ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the early days of American archaeology, starting with the sensational descriptions of Maya ruins in Central America by John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood from 1839 to 1842. The biological anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka examined every report of human remains in North America and dismissed all of them. His Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology appeared in 1894, a massive 730-page work that stands as one of the great monographs of nineteenth-century American archaeology. He was one of the first scholars to interpret the past on the basis of modern ethnographic data to work, as he put it, 'from the known to the unknown, step by step'. To Bandelier, archaeology was a means of extending anthropology and recorded history into the more distant past. It was from the interplay of these many cross-currents that modern South-western archaeology was born, with the development of tree-ring chronology and the first stratigraphic excavations in the pueblos.
