Papers relating to the Mesilla Valley Expedition
name: label: Collection Creator
content: Lehmer, Donald Jayne, 1918-1975
setName: label: See more items in
content: Donald Jayne Lehmer papers
unitdate: label: Date
content: 1927-1942
dataSource: label: Archival Repository
content: National Anthropological Archives
identifier: label: Identifier
content: NAA.1979-48, Series 6
objectType: label: Type
content: Archival materials
arrangement: label: Arrangement
content: Arranged chronologically
scopecontent: label: Scope and Contents
content: Included are correspondence, typescripts of correspondence, reports, specimen catalogs, historical references, field notes, photographs, drawings, maps, diagrams, and administrative forms.

During the summers of 1940 and 1941 Lehmer was in charge of the Mesilla Valley Expedition in Dona Ana County, New Mexico. The project was sponsored jointly by the Museum of New Mexico and the University of Arizona, with assistance from the Work Projects Adminstration. The purpose of the project was to investigate the El Paso Phase and try to determine its cultural antecedants. The procedure involved a preliminary study of all published data available. The principal sources used are listed in the bibliography of the final published report, "The Jornada Branch of the Mogollon," University of Arizona Social Science Bulletin, No. 17 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press), 1948. Much of the material collected during this preliminary research are included in this series as "Reference Materials." Included here are reports by A. V. Kidder, Wesley Bradfield, and Stanley Stubbs. The fieldwork was headquartered in Las Cruces, New Mexico and included a six week archeological reconnissance survey and the excavation of a pit house village, a cave, and an El Paso Phase pueblo. The work expanded the knowledge of the El Paso Phase itself and defined a series of three antecedent phases which carried the prehistory of the area back before 900 A.D.