Harold S. Gladwin

Harold Sterling Gladwin (1883–1983) was an American archaeologist, anthropologist, and born in New York City.

Harold Sterling Gladwin was an early twentieth century archaeologist that specialized in Southwestern archaeology of the United States. He also was known for his famed excavations at Snaketown, Arizona, in which he accomplished several publications on this topic; his theories on migration to the New World from Asia also gained attention.

Born in New York City in 1883, Harold worked in the city as a from 1908 to 1922, his first successful career. However, in 1922 Sterling decided to move west to California, and there he began work at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, taking a special interest in the mutations of butterflies. Harold’s interest in insects was soon replaced with an interest in American archaeology and, by 1924, he had become friends with A.V. Kidder, the noted archaeologist of the Southwestern United States; from this point on, Gladwin’s work was in archaeology.

Taking special interest in pottery shards and other refuse, Gladwin began to piece together theories on Hohokam culture as he excavated Casa Grande in 1927 in Arizona. Finding that the local Hohokam red-on-buff pottery artifacts were mixed with polychromes of the Salado Culture, Gladwin wondered how and why the two distinctive pottery types were together with no evidence for conflict between the Hohokam cultures of the Gila Basin and the Salado cultures of the Tonto Basin. Gladwin’s excavations in southern Arizona helped to renew an interest in this area that had been nearly forgotten since Frank Cushing had done his own excavations there in the late nineteenth century. In 1928, Harold and his future wife, Winifred, founded the Gila Pueblo Archaeological Foundation over the remains of a pueblo that the two had excavated together. As work in the area grew, the Gladwins began to move around the Southwest in search of clues about the origins of the prehistoric inhabitants. The Arizona State Museum Library & Archives holds the records to the Gila Pueblo Archaeological Foundation. The finding aid for this collection is located on Arizona Archives Online.

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