Linda S. Cordell (1943–2013)

AMAN aman12086 Dispatch: January 23, 2014 CE: N/A Journal MSP No. No. of pages: 4 PE: Jon Speilburg OBITUARIE OO F PR D TE EC Linda Cordell. (Photo courtesy of University of Colorado). Linda S. Cordell (1943–2013) The woman who literally “wrote the book” on Southwest archaeology, Linda S. Cordell, died on March 29, 2013, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She was among the most re- spected U.S. archaeologists of her generation, having been elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2005 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008, as well as receiving the A. V. Kidder Award for Excellence in American Archaeology from the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in 2001 and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) in 2009. Linda Seinfeld was born on October 11, 1943, in New York City. Her father, Harry Seinfeld, was a pharmacist who died in 1963 while Cordell was still in college. Her mother, Evelyn S. Kessler, was a cultural anthropologist who earned UN C OR R a Ph.D. from Columbia University and taught at the Uni- versity of South Florida in the 1970s. Linda remembered visiting the office of her “godmother,” Margaret Mead, at Columbia as a young girl. She attended George Washington University, and in 1964 she was one of five GW under- graduates to join Florence Hawley Ellis’s University of New Mexico field school at the pueblo of Sapawe, an experience that sparked her lifelong passion for Southwest archaeology (Cordell 1989a). After receiving her bachelor’s degree in 1965, she went on to the University of Oregon, where she earned a master’s in 1967, and then to the University of California, Santa Barbara, for her Ph.D., which she completed in 1972. Cordell joined the faculty of the University of New Mexico (UNM) in 1971; she served as chair of the Depart- ment of Anthropology from 1982 through 1987. In 1987, she was appointed as Irvine Curator and Chair of Anthropol- ogy at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco (becoming the only Southwest archaeologist with dolphins on her business card, she would say.) Although her tenure there was brief, it marked an important transition in her career toward museum administration. In 1993, she became director of the University of Colorado (CU) Museum of Natural History and professor of Anthropology, positions that she held until her retirement in 2006. After retirement, Cordell moved back to New Mexico, where she remained extremely active professionally. At the time of her death she held positions as senior scholar at the School for Advanced Research (SAR) in Santa Fe and, since 2010, as external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI). Cordell’s research focused on the archaeology of pre- contact agricultural communities in the U.S. Southwest. She was widely considered the foremost authority on the archaeology of the Rio Grande region of New Mexico, the homeland of the Eastern Pueblos (e.g., Cordell 1979, 1980a, 1989b; Eckert and Cordell 2004). Throughout her career, she was engaged in examining problems related to changing strategies of mobility, settlement, and interaction in the context of the highly dynamic social and environ- mental landscapes of the Ancestral Pueblo world. She at- tacked these problems using a constantly evolving set of the- oretical and methodological approaches that kept her work fresh and relevant to succeeding generations of Southwest archaeologists. While Cordell was a graduate student, her advisor was Albert Spaulding, an avid supporter of the use of statistics, quantitative methods, and early computer applications in C 2014 by the American Anthropological Association. AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 116, No. 1, pp. 1–4, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.12086