Mark Raymond Harrington

For other people named Mark Harrington, see Mark Harrington (disambiguation).

Mark Raymond Harrington (July 6, 1882—June 30, 1971) was curator of archaeology at the Southwest Museum 1928-1964 and discoverer of ancient Pueblo structures near Overton, Nevada and Little Lake, California.^[1]

Early life

Harrington knew early the rigors and fascinations of academic life. The son of Rose Martha Smith Harrington and Mark Walrod Harrington, a professor of astronomy at the University of Michigan who also held appointments in botany, zoology and geology,^[2] he spent his childhood roaming the area around Ann Arbor, Mich., his hometown, learning tribal languages from Indian friends and, when his family moved to Mount Vernon, New York, excavating and collecting local artifacts, thus feeding an early and lifelong interest in Native American culture.^[3]

Education and archaeological career

When his father's poor health and mental illness forced him to drop out of school, Harrington took some of his finds to Frederic Ward Putnam, then the curator in anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.^[4] Putnam hired Harrington as an apprentice field archaeologist, a post that eventually allowed him to attend Columbia University, where he studied under the celebrated anthropologist Franz Boas. He earned a bachelor of science degree in 1907 and a master of arts in anthropology in 1908. That same year, he went to work for George Gustav Heye, the collector of Native American artifacts who later established the Museum of the American Indian in New York City. Harrington spent three years collecting artifacts and documenting tribes in the East and Midwest for Heye. He was assistant curator at the University of Pennsylvania museum 1911-1915.

In 1912, Harrington met Mabel Dodge Luhan and introduced her and a group of friends to peyote during an impromptu "ceremony" at her apartment in Greenwich Village. Among the participants were Harrington's cousin of anarchist Hutchins Hapgood and his wife, author Neith Boyce Hapgood.^[5] This incident became legendary in counterculture circles.

In 1917, Harrington married Anna Alexander Johns, who gave him a son, Johns Heye Harrington, who was named with his mother's maiden name and Heye's last name and was born on September 5, 1918. Harrington spent the next 13 years working for Heye as an archaeologist, ethnologist, field collector and curator in Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri, Oklahoma, Nevada, Texas, Cuba, and Ecuador.

Beginning in 1925, Harrington made some of his most significant discoveries, of ancient dwellings of Pueblo Indians and their precursors, known as “the Basketmakers,” in Nevada. One find was a set of 46 structures, the largest of which contained 100 rooms. Harrington estimated the earliest occupiers to have been there around 1500 B.C. More recent studies have determined the artifacts from the site to be much more recent, from between 300 to 500 B.C. Some of the stone and adobe dwellings appeared to have been made by Pueblo Indians, whose antiquity he also overestimated. Later study showed them to be from 700-1150 A.D.^[3]

Anna died on August 13, 1927 of an unspecified "brief illness." In December of that year, Harrington married Edna L. Parker, a descendant of the famous Seneca religious leader of the Iroquois, Handsome Lake. She was also the sister of Arthur C. Parker, an archaeologist, folklorist and expert on Native Americans whose Iroquois name was Gawaso Wanneh. Friends knew Edna as Nandaka or Endeka.

Southwest Museum

In 1928, Harrington came to Los Angeles to be curator of archaeology at the Southwest Museum, beginning an association that would last until his retirement. During this time, he earned an honorary doctorate from Occidental College. He conducted excavations in Los Angeles, Nevada and other sites on behalf of the museum. He returned to the site, along the Muddy River, where he had made his earlier discoveries, to conduct a complete survey.

In 1930, Harrington bought the dilapidated Andrés Pico Adobe, also known as the Rómulo Pico Adobe or Ranchito Rómulo, near the San Fernando Rey Mission in the San Fernando Valley. It is one of the oldest residences in Los Angeles. Partial walls still stood, but the floor, roof, a staircase, window and door frames required rebuilding. Harrington also built an addition to the north wing of the house, put a fireplace in the living room, rebuilt patio walls and added a garage. The couple lived there 15 years.

At the time he undertook the Pico Adobe project, Harrington and a colleague also began to dig in Gypsum Cave in the Frenchman Range in Nevada, where they found Basketmaker artifacts, along with bones of an extinct species of ground sloth. Harrington concluded that both had existed at the same time and dated them to 8500 B.C., a controversial theory. Later studies showed he was in the correct range for the animal bones, but badly mistaken about the human artifacts, which were dated to 900-400 B.C. His dating for another site at Tule Springs, near Las Vegas, has equally been called into question. Harrington found a spear point in an apparent fire pit alongside the bones of several ancient animals, which led him to assert in a published article that they were contemporaries and that the site was between 10,000 and 25,000 years old. More recent scrutiny has put his dating in doubt, however.^[3]

In 1933, on loan from the museum, Harrington went to work for the National Park Service under the Civilian Conservation Corps. He directed a project to salvage as much as possible of the Pueblo Grande de Nevada archaeological site, also known as Nevada's "Lost City," near Overton, Nevada. The site was about to be destroyed by the new Lake Mead, born of the construction of Hoover Dam. They found 17 new sites and dug until “there was literally water lapping at their boots.”^[6]

In 1947, Harrington learned from a friend of an ancient site located about 160 miles northeast of Los Angeles that contained artifacts attributed to the Pinto Culture, believed to have existed in the area as early as 3000 B.C. Harrington excavated the location—dubbed the Stahl site for the composer Willy Stahl, its discoverer—for at least the next two years. During this time, on September 20, 1948, Edna died. He married a third time, to author Marie Toma Walsh, in April of the following year. Harrington published his report on the Stahl site in 1957.

Harrington retired from the Southwest Museum in 1964. He died in 1971 and is buried at the San Fernando Mission Cemetery in Mission Hills.

References

1. ^ "Autry National Center | Collections Online". Autrycollections.org. http://www.autrycollections.org/mwebcgi/mweb.exe?request=record;id=PE63294;type=701. Retrieved 2010-09-17. 
2. ^ "Stargazing: 150 Years of Astronomy at the University of Michigan". Bentley.umich.edu. http://bentley.umich.edu/exhibits/astro/faculty.php. Retrieved 2010-09-17. 
3. ^ ^{a b c} "The First 100 Persons Who Shaped Southern Nevada". 1st100.com. http://www.1st100.com/part1/harrington.html. Retrieved 2010-09-17. 
4. ^ http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/~hua15003
5. ^ Luhan, Mabel Dodge (1936) Movers and Shakers New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company.
6. ^ "Mark Raymond Harrington". Mnsu.edu. http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/fghij/harrington_mark.html. Retrieved 2010-09-17. 

Persondata
Name	Harrington, Mark Raymond
Alternative names
Short description	American archaeologist
Date of birth	July 6, 1882
Place of birth
Date of death	June 30, 1971
Place of death