Papers of Gordon Randolph Willey

Gordon Randolph Willey (1913-2002), archaeologist, taught at Harvard University from 1950 to 1987. He graduated from the University of Arizona in 1935 and received his AM in 1936. He earned his PhD from Columbia University in 1942, then became a Senior Anthropologist at the Bureau of American Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution in 1943. While at the Smithsonian, Willey worked on editing The Handbook of South American Indians, and fielded expeditions to Peru and Panama.

He left the Smithsonian in 1950 to become the first Bowditch Professor of Mexican and Central American Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard, serving as chairman of the Department of Anthropology from 1954 to 1957. He was also Curator of Middle American Archaeology at the Peabody Museum. Willey retired from the Bowditch chair in 1983, but continued at Harvard as a Senior Professor of anthropology until 1987.

Willey completed field work in Panama in 1952, British Honduras from 1953 to 1956, and then, in 1958, embarked on an intensive ten-year field program in the Guatemalan Peten, a dense rainforest rich with Mayan remains. He excavated in North, Central and South America, a hemispheric coverage that gave him an in-depth knowledge of the Pre-Columbian culture history of the New World. His paramount research interests, however, were in Mesoamerica and South America, with a specialization in the Maya, especially the Maya of the lowland jungles.

Willey was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the British Academy. The Guatemalan government conferred on him the Order of the Quetzal for his extensive archaeological research in that country. Willey was president of the American Anthropological Association in 1961, president of the Society for American Archaeology in 1968, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and senior consultant to the Pre-Columbian program at Dumbarton Oaks. Willey died in 2002.