Selling Adolph Bandelier Books in Albuquerque: The Archaeologist Behind the Monument

By Josh Eldred · New Mexico Literacy Project · May 30, 2026 · ~1,800 words

Last verified May 2026 · Original research by Josh Eldred, who has bought and sorted New Mexico estate libraries for a decade.

The man behind the monument

Bandelier was born in Bern, Switzerland, in 1840 and emigrated as a youth to Highland, Illinois, a Swiss immigrant community, where he chafed in the family business before finding his life’s work. Mentored by the pioneering anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, he turned to the brand-new fields of archaeology and ethnology and threw himself into the indigenous Southwest. Beginning his fieldwork in Sonora, Arizona, and New Mexico, he became, with Frank Hamilton Cushing, one of the leading authorities on the region’s prehistoric civilizations at a time when the disciplines themselves were being invented.

Working out of the Pueblo of Isleta, he made lasting New Mexico friendships — with the French-born missionary Father Anton Docher, the “Padre of Isleta,” and with the writer-ethnologist Charles Fletcher Lummis, who traveled with him for a time in South America. His studies of the Frijoles Canyon sites in the Jemez Mountains established their importance and led, after his death, to the creation of Bandelier National Monument; an Albuquerque elementary school bears his name as well. He left the Southwest in 1892 for years of research in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru, and died in Seville, Spain, in 1914.

The Delight Makers and the scholarly reports

Bandelier’s most collectible literary book is The Delight Makers (1890), a novel of Ancestral Puebloan life set in Frijoles Canyon — an attempt to make the archaeology live by telling a story inside it. It is regarded as a landmark of Southwest fiction and has been reprinted many times, but the 1890 first edition is the prize. His other narrative book, The Gilded Man (El Dorado) (1893), gathered “pictures of the Spanish occupancy of America.”

Alongside the fiction stands a body of foundational scholarship, much of it published in the Papers of the Archaeological Institute of America, American Series: the Historical Introduction to Studies among the Sedentary Indians of New Mexico and the Report on the Ruins of the Pueblo of Pecos (1881, the first volume of the series), the Report of an Archaeological Tour in Mexico in 1881 (1884), and the two-volume Final Report of Investigations among the Indians of the South-Western United States (1890–1892). He also edited and published, with a translation by his wife, The Journey of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (1905) — the 16th-century narrative whose protagonist gave a prominent New Mexico family its name.

First-edition identification

Bandelier’s books split into two collecting worlds — a trade novel and institutional scholarly reports — and they are identified differently:

• The Delight Makers — look for the 1890 first. The first edition was published in New York by Dodd, Mead & Company in 1890. Later printings and the well-known 20th-century reissues (with added introductions) are common; the value separation is between an 1890 first and everything after, so check the title and copyright pages for the date.
• The Archaeological Institute reports are dated, numbered series volumes. The AIA American Series papers carry their series and volume designation and original wrappers or cloth; a complete, clean original report — especially the 1881 Pecos volume or the 1890–92 two-volume Final Report — is the collectible object, and condition and completeness matter enormously for 19th-century institutional printings.
• Watch for the modern scholarly editions. University of Arizona Press and others have published modern editions of Bandelier’s work (for example the 1981 Discovery of New Mexico); these are valuable as references but are not the 19th-century firsts.

The collector market — three tiers

Tier 1 — trophy: the 1890 Dodd, Mead first edition of The Delight Makers; original Archaeological Institute reports, especially the 1881 Pecos Pueblo report and the 1890–1892 two-volume Final Report; and any signed or association copy.

Tier 2 — collector: The Gilded Man (1893); the 1905 Cabeza de Vaca translation; and the better early-20th-century reissues of The Delight Makers.

Tier 3 — reading copies: modern paperback and reprint editions of The Delight Makers and modern scholarly reissues of the reports. These keep Bandelier readable and are the copies that do the most good donated into New Mexico classrooms and libraries.

Where he turns up — and how NMLP handles him

Bandelier surfaces in two kinds of New Mexico libraries: the collections of readers who love Southwest fiction and history, where The Delight Makers sits beside the regional novelists; and the working libraries of archaeologists, anthropologists, and Pueblo-history scholars, where his reports live among the field literature. Both are common in the Albuquerque–Santa Fe corridor, and in both, a genuine 19th-century Bandelier — an 1890 Delight Makers or an original AIA report — can hide among ordinary old books.

When his books come through a New Mexico Literacy Project pickup, the handling is the same as for any collectible New Mexico author: 19th-century firsts, original reports, and signed copies are identified by hand and routed to specialist dealers or kept for the regional record rather than bulk-sorted; clean reissues go through careful resale; and reading copies go back to New Mexico classrooms and readers. Nothing readable is landfilled. If you are clearing a New Mexico home and an old archaeology book or an antique novel of Pueblo life makes you pause, that pause is worth a text.

External References

• Wikipedia: Adolph Bandelier — life, fieldwork, and bibliography.
• Bandelier National Monument, National Park Service.
• The Delight Makers (1890) — full scanned text at the Internet Archive.
• Works by Adolph Bandelier at Project Gutenberg.

Related on This Site

• New Mexico Native American Literature — the Pueblo world Bandelier studied and dramatized.
• Collecting New Mexico Ethnobotany — the parallel tradition of recording the plants and lifeways of the region.
• William Eastlake — the modern novelist of the same Jemez country Bandelier first mapped.
• Fabiola Cabeza de Baca — whose family name traces to the Cabeza de Vaca narrative Bandelier translated.
• The New Mexico Literary Atlas — where Frijoles Canyon and the Pajarito Plateau sit in the state’s literary geography.