Edgar Lee Hewett, an archaeologist who is renowned in the Southwest, was founder of the Museum of New Mexico and director of the School of American Archaeology (today's School for Advanced Research), but what was the deal with his personality?

"He wasn't a particularly nice guy," said James E. Snead, who presents a lecture about Hewett's archaeological legacy at the New Mexico Film Museum on Friday, Jan. 16. "A lot of people just despised him. One thing that interested me was that Hewett's great patron, Frank Springer, was often neglected, and Hewett took him for granted. But when Springer's friends would ask him about it, he'd say it was Hewett's vision that he supported, even though the man was somewhat flawed."

Hewett's vision, which found inspiration in the Ancestral Puebloan presence in the landscapes of the Rito de los Frijoles and Chaco Canyon, drove him to work for passage of the Antiquities Act of 1906, which protects American Indian cultural resources on federal lands. It is also known as the Lacey Act — named after Rep. John Fletcher Lacey of Iowa, chairman of the House Committee on Public Lands, who worked with Hewett on the bill.

Beginning at the end of the 19th century, Hewett also waged a long campaign to protect a large part of the area, to be called Pajarito Park. It wasn't until 1916 that Congress acted on that recommendation, but it was for a much-reduced parcel with a different name: Bandelier National Monument.

Snead's talk, "Winds of a Thousand Years: Edgar Lee Hewett and the Ancient Southwest," is part of a Hewett-themed series presented by Friends of Archaeology. The series continues with Friday lectures through Feb. 6 at the New Mexico Film Museum.

Since 2001, Snead has been a research collaborator at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History and a research associate at the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture in Santa Fe. Snead, who grew up in Santa Fe, has been principal investigator on the Pajarito Trails Project since 1999 and the Tano Origins Project since 2002.

Snead is the author of Ruins and Rivals: The Making of Southwest Archaeology (The University of Arizona Press, 2001) and Ancestral Landscapes of the Pueblo World (The University of Arizona Press, 2008). He is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

Pasatiempo recently spoke with Snead, who was in Los Angeles, having returned the day before from India, where his wife, archaeologist Monica L. Smith, has a long-running archaeology project.

Pasatiempo: There is so much to talk about regarding Hewett. How will you focus your lecture?

James E. Snead: It's a challenge. Hewett is a protean figure in so many ways. My mission is to focus on his legacy within Southwest archaeology, particularly focusing on the northern Río Grande region. That's my own stomping grounds, and it was Hewett's as well. At the core, what he was really trying to do when he came to Northern New Mexico in the 1890s was to become an archaeologist, and it's how that happened and what he did at places like Bandelier and Chaco that make it an interesting tale.

Hewett was an educator and an entrepreneur and a booster for the American West, and he brought all of that to archaeology. Prior to that, it had been a fairly obscure activity conducted by government scientists.

Pasa: Do you consider his work on the Lacey Act to be an important part of his legacy?

Snead: I do, although it sometimes seems a little obscure. Prior to the passage of the Lacey Act, there was no real vehicle for archaeological preservation. Hewett was successful at networking and lobbying, at bringing together the various parties at the table. He actually took Lacey out to the Pajarito.

Pasa: They slept in the cavates [small cave-like rooms carved into the cliffsides].

Snead: Yeah, because Hewett understood there was this sort of visceral appeal that you couldn't get in a smoky conference room in Washington.

Pasa: In Ruins and Rivals, you point out that Hewett was criticized around here for his emphasis on classical, rather than Southwestern, archaeology. But when he discussed the sermon given by St. Paul in Athens around the campfire in the Rito, it "enhanced the aura of respectability of the ruins in the vicinity," as you write.

Snead: What Hewett did was to say, OK, we're very interested in classical archaeology or the archaeology of the ancient Near East because this is our own cultural legacy, and why can't we look at the past of this area in that same way? By fusing those two ideas — the on-the-ground exploration of antiquity and the idea that it had some cultural value, that it was worth studying for its own sake, and that we could learn things about it, just like we can learn things about Pompeii — it created a very powerful model.

When I was doing the research for Ruins and Rivals, I was seeing the editorial page in The New Mexican back then saying things like, "The Indian is gone. Let him go. These do-gooders trying to save this stuff are misguided." Then on the next page there would be fascinating discussions of Hewett and the Pajarito culture and the ruins, so you could see the two trends sort of struggling with each other. Hewett did have some self-serving motivations, because he was also trying to make a career for himself, but his mission was to bridge the gap between negative stereotypes about Native Americans and the power of archaeology to link up people to a landscape.

Pasa: In your new book, Ancestral Landscapes of the Pueblo World, you are reportedly using a new approach called landscape archaeology to understand ancestral Pueblo communities. Does that relate to Hewett?

Snead: Absolutely. The kind of work that he did up on the Pajarito ... archaeologists are supposed to dig holes in the ground and find things down there and get dates. That's supposed to be our mission. But Hewett developed another model with the assistance of J.P. Harrington, who was a pioneer in ethnogeography: he would go to the pueblos and walk the countryside and ask the people the names of things.

Pasa: That sounds like Keith Basso's research into Apache place names in his book Wisdom Sits in Places.

Snead: Well, the original idea for the approach Basso used comes from an earlier era. You're getting information from the Pueblo people, and Hewett is documenting trails and shrines and petroglyphs, recording archaeological data on a broad scale instead of spending all his time in the cavates in Frijoles Canyon digging up artifacts.

People in my generation were really inspired by Basso and the idea that there's more to this landscape than just statistics. Growing up in those landscapes, it inevitably affects you. I took field trips to Bandelier when I was in junior high, and I remember scrambling in and out of those caves, walking those trails, climbing up boulders that had hand- and toe-holds pecked in them, and being really fascinated, but you couldn't read about it anywhere.

Pasa: The establishment was irritated with Hewett because of his summer field schools, but they are just the kind of educational experience that seem most appropriate in archaeology.

Snead: That's one of the really important and often overlooked aspects of his legacy. When you go to Bandelier today and see all the plaques, one thing you won't see is that this was the site of the first really systematic field educational program in American archaeology. His point was that we should be training not only archaeologists but also average folks.

details
"Winds of a Thousand Years: Edgar Lee Hewett and the Ancient Southwest," lecture by James E. Snead
5:30 p.m. Friday, Jan. 16
New Mexico Film Museum, 418 Montezuma St.
$15; call Friends of Archaeology at 992-2715, Ext. 8, for tickets and information