Frank C. Hibben

Frank Cumming Hibben (December 5, 1910 – June 11, 2002) was a well-known archaeologist whose research focused on the U.S. Southwest. As a professor at the University of New Mexico (UNM) and writer of popular books and articles, he inspired many people to study archaeology. He was also controversial, being suspected of scientific fraud during his studies of Paleo-Indian cultures.

Hibben was born on December 5, 1910 in Lakewood, Ohio. He became interested in archaeology as a child, working summers at digs. He received his bachelor's degree in archaeology from Princeton University in 1933 and a master's degree in zoology from the UNM in 1936.

While a graduate student, Hibben was put in charge of the university's archaeology collections (the core of what became the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology). He returned East for one year to attend Harvard University, which awarded him a Ph.D. in anthropology in 1940. Hibben then taught at UNM until his retirement, except for a period of service in the U.S. Navy during World War II.

During much of his career, Hibben was the director of the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology.

Hibben's first marriage and subsequent investments made him a millionaire. In 2000, he donated part of his fortune to build an archaeology research building at UNM. (Due to the controversies surrounding his career, the decision to name the new building after him was questioned.) When Hibben died, the remainder of his fortune was used, as he had directed, to endow scholarships at UNM.

The primary source of the controversies was Hibben's claim to have found a deposit with pre-Clovis artifacts (including projectile points, which he termed "Sandia points") in Sandia Cave (in the Sandia Mountains near Albuquerque, New Mexico). Hibben believed the layers to be about 25,000 years old, much older than the Paleo-Indian cultures previously documented in the U.S. Southwest. The layers also included the bones of species such as camels, mastodons, and horses.

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