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The Swarts Ruin

The Swarts Ruin

A Typical Mimbres Site in Southwestern New Mexico, With a New Introduction by Steven A. LeBlanc

Harriet S. Cosgrove, C. Burton Cosgrove

ISBN 9780873652148

Publication date: 01/16/2012

This classic volume on the evocative and enigmatic pottery of the Mimbres people has become an irreplaceable design catalogue for contemporary Native American artists. Burt and Harriet (Hattie) Cosgrove were self-trained archaeologists who began excavating Mimbres materials in 1919. When their meticulous research came to the attention of Alfred V. Kidder of the Peabody Museum, he invited them to direct the Mimbres Valley Expedition at the Swarts Ranch in southern New Mexico on behalf of the Peabody.

Working in the summers of 1924 to 1927, the Cosgroves recovered nearly 10,000 artifacts at the Swarts site, including an extraordinary assemblage of Mimbres ceramics. Like their original 1932 report, this paperbound facsimile edition includes over 700 of Hattie Cosgrove’s beautiful line drawings of individual Mimbres pots. It also presents a new introduction by archaeologist Steven A. LeBlanc, who reviews the eighty years of research on the Mimbres that have followed the Cosgroves’ groundbreaking study. The Peabody’s reissue of The Swarts Ruin once again makes available a rich resource for scholars, artists, and admirers of Native American art, and it places in historical context the Cosgroves’ many contributions to North American archaeology.

Praise

  • In 1932 the Swarts Ruin report by avocational archaeologists Hattie and Burt Cosgrove brought a symbolic end to the proto-scientific era of archaeology in New Mexico's Mimbres Valley. This welcome new edition of the report is enhanced by an informative introductory essay by Harvard archaeologist Steven LeBlanc, whose work in the 1970s reinvigorated archaeological research in the Mimbres area.

    —J. J. Brody, author of Mimbres Painted Pottery

Authors

  • Harriet S. “Hattie” Cosgrove was a self-trained archaeologist who, as a Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology employee, was an important early excavator in the American Southwest.
  • C. Burton “Burt” Cosgrove was a self-trained archaeologist who, as a Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology employee, was an important early excavator in the American Southwest.
  • Steven A. LeBlanc is an archaeologist and former Director of Collections at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.
  • A. V. Kidder was a leading American archaeologist who led expeditions for Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and the Carnegie Institution.

Book Details

  • 454 pages
  • 6 x 9 inches
  • Peabody Museum Press
  • Introduction by Steven A. LeBlanc and Alfred Vincent Kidder

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