Florence Hawley Ellis

Florence May Hawley Ellis (born September 17, 1906 in Cananea , Mexico , † 1991 ) was an American anthropologist and archaeologist . She was one of the first experts in dendrochronology and made a significant contribution to establishing this method in archeology.

Life

Florence Hawley's father was a chemist who worked in the copper - mining town of Cananea. The unrest of the Mexican Revolution prompted the family to move to Miami .

Florence Hawley attended the University of Arizona , where she received her bachelor's degree in English and anthropology in 1927 . In 1928 she received her masters degree for a thesis on prehistoric ceramics in Arizona. Together with her father, she worked on chemical analyzes of ceramic painting, a method that was still little used at the time.

From 1928 to 1933 she taught at the University of Arizona. There she also attended seminars on the new method of dendrochronology with its founder Andrew Ellicott Douglass . When the university had to lay off a large part of its teaching staff due to the " Great Depression " in 1933 , Hawley decided to use her savings to complete her dissertation on the settlement history of Chaco Canyon . Your Ph.D. received it from the University of Chicago in 1934 . For her analysis she used a combination of archaeological and dendrochronological data as well as statistical approaches (especially the chi-square test ) and was one of the first to apply these methods in archeology.

In 1934 Florence Hawley received a professorship at the University of New Mexico . In 1936 she married the archaeologist Donovan Senter, with whom she had a daughter. They divorced in 1947. In 1950 Hawley married the historian Bruce Ellis.

Until her retirement in 1971, Hawley taught at the University of New Mexico. Among other things, she gave courses in dendrochronology and worked on a dendrochronological sequence for the southwestern United States. Throughout her entire university career, she campaigned for equal pay and recognition for women in science.

The Florence Hawley Ellis Museum of Anthropology near Abiquiú in New Mexico is named after Hawley .

Fonts

• The Significance of the Dated Prehistory of Chetro Ketl, Chaco Cañon, New Mexico. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque 1934.
• Field Manual of Prehistoric Southwestern Pottery Types. University of New Mexico, Albuquerque 1936.
• Classification of Black Pottery Pigments and Paint Areas. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque 1938 (with Fred G. Hawley).
• Tree-ring Analysis and Dating in the Mississippi Drainage. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1941.
• A Reconstruction of the Basic Jemez Pattern of Social Organization. With Comparisons to Other Tanoan Social Structures. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque 1964.
• An Anthropological Study of the Navajo Indians. Garland, New York 1974, ISBN 0-8240-0703-4 .
• Anthropological Data Pertaining to the Taos land Claim. Garland, New York 1974, ISBN 0-8240-0725-5 .
• Anthropology of Laguna Pueblo Land Claims. Garland, New York 1974, ISBN 0-8240-0727-1 .
• Archaeologic and Ethnologic Data. Acoma-Laguna Land Claims. Garland, New York 1974, ISBN 0-8240-0726-3 .
• The Hopi. Their History and Use of Lands. Garland, New York 1974, ISBN 0-8240-0706-9 .
• From Drought to Drought. An Archaeological Record of Life Patterns as Developed by the Gallina Indians of North Central New Mexico (AD 1050 to 1300). Sunstone Press, Santa Fe 1988, ISBN 0-86534-120-6 .
• San Gabriel del Yungue as seen by an archaeologist. Sunstone Press, Santa Fe 1989, ISBN 0-86534-129-X .

literature

• Cheryl Claassen (Ed.): Women in Archeology. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 1994, ISBN 0-8122-3277-1 , pp. 13-14.
• Gabriele Kass-Simon, Patricia Farnes (eds.): Women of Science. Righting the record. Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1993, ISBN 0-253-20813-0 , pp. 21-26.

Web links

• Short biography on the website of the University of New Mexico