Gordon Willey, 89; Archeologist Wrote Books on the Americas

It wasn’t always awards and accolades for the Harvard professor considered the dean of North, Central and South American archeology.

“In what was no less than five minutes after we had driven into the morass we were seeing the last vestiges of daylight as the gray-yellow murk of the swamp was blotting out the horizon.... Besides, a water moccasin had entangled himself in the steering wheel and was threatening to give us hell if we disturbed him again,” he wrote in his 1940 field notes at the end of a particularly trying day.

Gordon Randolph Willey, who not only got out of that swamp, but also went on to write everything from limericks to archeological novels to the scholarly “Archaeology of the Florida Gulf Coast,” which established him as an expert and has remained a classic for more than 50 years, has died. He was 89.

Willey, who taught at Harvard from 1950 until 1987 and was curator of anthropology at its Peabody Museum, died Sunday of heart failure in Cambridge, Mass., Harvard officials said.

When the landmark 1949 book about Florida’s maize- and pumpkin-planting Indians was reissued in 1998, an editor’s note praised its enduring usefulness to archeologists and added: “Gordon Willey himself is a classic.”

Willey, in all his research of Native Americans, Mayas and others, utilized his expertise on pottery to trace cultures chronologically. The Florida book is considered a concise overview of early archeology in the area ranging from 1800 to the federally funded research programs of the Depression in the 1930s. It has provided a baseline for subsequent research.

Also classic in archeological literature is Willey’s two-volume “Introduction to American Archaeology,” published in 1966 and 1971, and his 1974 “History of American Archaeology,” written with his former student Jeremy Sabloff and now in its third edition.

Revered among scholars of the Maya of Central America, Willey conducted several excavations in Belize, Guatemala and Honduras.

He co-wrote such books as “The Origins of Maya Civilization” in 1977 and “Lowland Maya Settlement Patterns” in 1981. He also co-edited “A Consideration of the Early Classic Period in the Maya Lowlands” in 1985.

Willey is recognized as having created the field of “settlement pattern studies,” in which ruins and detritus are examined to determine the political, economic and social interaction of ancient peoples. He pioneered the methodology in Peru’s Viru Valley in the 1940s.

Born in Chariton, Iowa, on March 7, 1913, Willey earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Arizona and his doctorate from Columbia University. He worked as a Smithsonian Institution anthropologist until he joined the Harvard faculty.

The awards and accolades did appear regularly to acknowledge his life-long research. Among the honors were Guatemala’s Order of Quetzal; a fellowship to Cambridge University in England; medals from the American Anthropological Assn., the Royal Anthropology Institute of London and the Society of Antiquaries of London; and the Walker Prize from Boston’s Museum of Science.

In his off-duty hours, Willey turned his entertaining field-note writing style to creating rollicking limericks for students and friends, plays for Boston’s Tavern Club, and archeological mystery novels such as “Selena.”

Willey is survived by two daughters, Alexandra Guralnick and Winston Adler, and five grandchildren.

A memorial service is scheduled for 10 a.m. May 8 at Christ Church in Cambridge.