Archaeology Giant Willey, 90, Dies

Harvard professor emeritus Gordon Randolph Willey, one of the world’s most respected scholars of American archeology, died of heart failure this past Sunday. He was 90.

Willey, who retired in 1987, taught in the Anthropology department for 36 years.

“He trained two full generations of archeologists,” said William L. Fash, one of Willey’s former students and current chair of the Anthropology department. He is also the Bodwitch Professor of Central American and Mexican Archaeology and Ethnology.

“He brought light and warmth to everyone who knew him,” he added.

Willey, an “icon of the discipline,” was the “epitome of the old style Harvard professor,” Fash said.

He wore three-piece suits adorned with a gold pocket watch to class, “but as soon as you were outside the classroom, it was if you were with your best friend at a bar having a drink,” recalled Fash.

“Above all, he was a great gentlemen,” said Willey’s long-time friend Kathy Jones.

Born in Chariton, Iowa in 1913, Willey attended the University of Arizona and got his Ph.D at Columbia University in 1942.

He is best know for his field work in the Brvu valley in Peru which culminated in his 1953 article “Settlement Pattern Survey,” in which he proposed and explicated the method of tracing human occupation of regions by studying their effects on the landscape.

These observations provided insight into people’s economic, political and social organization.

“It was the kind of thing which people immediately recognized and said, ‘Well of course we should be doing this,’” said Wendy Ashmore, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Riverside.

“He was a giant in the field,” Ashmore said.

Willey’s findings have been applied across the field in the study of households to cities, according to Ashmore.

Outside of academia, Willey wrote anthropological mystery novels, one of which has been published under the title “Selena.” He also wrote plays for the Tavern Club of Boston, of which he was a member.

“He was witty and wonderful,” Jones recalled.

Willey served as the president of both the American Anthropological Association and the Society for American Archaeology. His combined work with Jeremy Sabloff, A History of American Archaeology, continues to be a standard reference for those working in the field.

“He was beloved by both students and the profession at large,” said Fash. “Willey will not soon be fore gotten.”

Willey is survived by two daughters and five grandchildren.