Mark Raymond Harrington (July 6, 1882 – June 30, 1971) was curator of archaeology at the Southwest Museum from 1928 to 1964 and discoverer of ancient Pueblo structures near Overton, Nevada, and Little Lake, California.
Early life
Harrington knew early the rigors and fascinations of academic life. The son of Rose Martha Smith Harrington and Mark Walrod Harrington, a professor of astronomy at the University of Michigan who also held appointments in botany, zoology and geology, he spent his childhood roaming the area around Ann Arbor, Mich., his hometown, learning tribal languages from Indian friends and, when his family moved to Mount Vernon, New York, excavating and collecting local artifacts, thus feeding an early and lifelong interest in Native American culture.
Education and archaeological career
When his father's poor health and mental illness forced him to drop out of school, Harrington took some of his finds to Frederic Ward Putnam, then the curator in anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Putnam hired Harrington as an apprentice field archaeologist, a post that eventually allowed him to attend Columbia University, where he studied under the celebrated anthropologist Franz Boas. He earned a bachelor of science degree in 1907 and a Master of Arts in anthropology in 1908. That same year, he went to work for George Gustav Heye, the collector of Native American artifacts who later established the Museum of the American Indian in New York City. Harrington spent three years collecting artifacts and documenting tribes in the East and Midwest for Heye. He was assistant curator at the University of Pennsylvania museum from 1911 to 1915.
In 1912, Harrington met Mabel Dodge Luhan and introduced her and a group of friends to peyote during an impromptu "ceremony" at her apartment in Greenwich Village. Among the participants were anarchist Hutchins Hapgood and his wife, Harrington's cousin, author Neith Boyce Hapgood. This incident became legendary in counterculture circles.
In 1915, Harrington found native Taíno villagers on eastern Cuba while conducting fieldwork. Later in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, he brought anthropologists to record the skeletal structure, blood type, and other physical attributes of the villagers.
In 1917, Harrington married Anna Alexander Johns, with whom he had a son, Johns Heye Harrington. He was born on September 5, 1918, and was named after his mother's maiden name and Gustav Heye. Harrington spent the next 13 years working for Heye as an archaeologist, ethnologist, field collector and curator in Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri, Oklahoma, Nevada, Texas, Cuba, and Ecuador.
Beginning in 1925, Harrington made some of his most significant discoveries, of ancient dwellings of Pueblo Indians and their precursors, known as “the Basketmakers,” in Nevada. One find was a set of 46 structures, the largest of which contained 100 rooms. Harrington estimated the earliest occupiers to have been there around 1500 BC. More recent studies have determined the artifacts from the site to be much more recent, from between 500 BC to 300 BC. Some of the stone and adobe dwellings appeared to have been made by Pueblo Indians, whose antiquity he also overestimated. Later study showed them to be from 700 to 1150 AD.
Anna died on August 13, 1927, of an unspecified "brief illness." In December of that year, Harrington married Edna L. Parker, a descendant of the famous Seneca religious leader of the Iroquois, Handsome Lake. She was also the sister of Arthur C. Parker, an archaeologist, folklorist and expert on Native Americans whose Iroquois name was Gawaso Wanneh. Friends knew Edna as Nandaka or Endeka and she often assisted Harrington on excavations.
Southwest Museum
In 1928, Harrington came to Los Angeles to be curator of archaeology at the Southwest Museum, beginning an association that would last until his retirement. During this time, he earned an honorary doctorate from Occidental College. He conducted excavations in Los Angeles, Nevada and other sites on behalf of the museum. He returned to the site, along the Muddy River, where he had made his earlier discoveries, to conduct a complete survey.
In 1930, Harrington bought the dilapidated Andrés Pico Adobe, also known as the Rómulo Pico Adobe or Ranchito Rómulo, near the San Fernando Rey Mission in the San Fernando Valley. It is one of the oldest residences in Los Angeles. Partial walls still stood, but the floor, roof, a staircase, window and door frames required rebuilding. Harrington also built an addition to the north wing of the house, put a fireplace in the living room, rebuilt patio walls and added a garage. The couple lived there 15 years.