Gordon R. Willey

Gordon Willey in the Viru Valley

Biography

Gordon Randolph Willey was an American archaeologist who spent most of his career working as the Bowditch Professor of Mexican and Central American Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. He researched and excavated a variety of sites throughout North, Central and South America and as such influenced a generation of American archaeologists, through his teachings and writings. Willey was born on March 7, 1913 in Chariton, Iowa, where his father owned a drug store. In 1925, Willey and his parents moved to Long Beach, California, where he attended high school. Always a fan of history, Willey decided in 1929, while still a student at Woodrow Wilson High School, that he wanted to become an archaeologist (Pastmasters 100).

Gordon Willey began his undergraduate career at the University of Arizona in 1931. Upon graduating in 1935, Willey went to a field school at Kinishba, in the White Mountains of Arizona, with his professor Byron Cummings, after which he returned to Arizona for his A.M. Willey’s masters thesis was written on archaeological field methods and was titled “Methods and Problems in Archaeological Excavation, with Special Reference to the Southwestern United States” (Portraits 8-10, 15, 20; Pastmasters 102). Upon completion of his thesis, Willey accepted a Laboratory of Anthropology Field Fellowship for the summer of 1936. That summer, the Fellowship took him to a project in Macon, Georgia under the direction of Arthur Randolph Kelly. After the Fellowship, Willey stayed behind in Macon to work on a dendrochronology project, developing a tree ring sequence dating back to AD 1800, which lead to his first publication, “Notes on Central Georgia Dendrochronology” in 1937 (Pastmasters 104; Portraits 20–38).

While still working on the Macon project, Gordon Willey met and married his wife, Katharine Whaley. Just after that, he accepted a position on a Louisiana project with James Alfred Ford, whom he had met the previous summer, and he and Katharine moved to New Orleans. The Louisiana project had two digs, one at Crooks Mound and one at the Greenhouse site near Marksville, and the project’s laboratory in New Orleans was Willey’s responsibility (Portraits 58, Pastmasters 104). After his work in Louisiana, Willey was accepted into two Ph.D. programs, at the University of Chicago and Columbia. He chose Columbia and in September of 1939 left New Orleans for New York City (Portraits 22, 60; Pastmasters 105).

After enrolling at Columbia, Gordon Willey began work in northwest Florida during the summer of 1940 (Portraits 61). Willey had become interested in Florida’s Gulf Coast when he noticed similarities in the ceramics of the area with those of Georgia and Louisiana (1949a: 1). He and R.B. Woodbury surveyed sites and test pitted along Florida’s northwest Gulf coast, finding a number of shell middens and burial mounds (1942). Willey’s largest book on the area, Archaeology of the Florida Gulf Coast, is still printed and widely read. Jerald Milanich (2007: 22–23) notes that it is because of the scope of the book (Willey examined over 250 sites) and quality of the data and interpretation that Willey’s work is still relevant today.