Prehistoric Indians of the Southwest

Hannah Marie Wormington (1914–1994) was one of the most important archaeologists the American Southwest ever produced — and one of the very few women directing major research programs in the field during the mid-twentieth century. She spent her career at the Colorado Museum of Natural History (later the Denver Museum of Nature & Science), eventually serving as Curator of Archaeology, and her work on Paleo-Indian cultures helped establish the chronological framework that Southwestern archaeology still uses today.

Prehistoric Indians of the Southwest was her popular-audience masterwork: a comprehensive survey of Ancestral Puebloan, Mogollon, Hohokam, and Patayan cultures, written in clear prose that made serious archaeology accessible without sacrificing rigor. The Denver Museum published it in 1947 as Popular Series No. 7 — a modest institutional paperback — and it stayed in print for nearly three decades, reaching an eleventh printing by 1973. That kind of longevity in a museum publication is extraordinary. Trade-press archaeology books from the same era are long forgotten; this one kept selling because it was simply the best introduction available.

The appendix is by Erik K. Reed, Regional Archaeologist for the National Park Service, based in Santa Fe. Reed’s contribution catalogs “Outstanding Exhibit-Sites, Modern Pueblos, Local Museums” across the Southwest — many of them in New Mexico: Chaco Canyon, Bandelier, Gila Cliff Dwellings, Aztec Ruins, Kuaua (Coronado State Monument), and the living pueblos along the Rio Grande. For anyone exploring New Mexico’s deep past, Reed’s appendix reads like a field guide written by the man who knew these sites from the inside.

Our copy is the eleventh printing, dated 1973 on the title page, with “First Edition, 1947” also stated. The cover carries a beautiful diagonal band of Ancestral Puebloan key-and-fret geometric design in red and tan — period-perfect mid-century museum publishing, the kind of quiet graphic design that collectors of institutional Southwestern publications look for. There’s a previous owner’s signature on the title page. Softcover, age-toned but solid — exactly the kind of well-used reference copy that tells you someone actually took it into the field or kept it on the shelf next to their pottery collection.

I handle a lot of Southwestern reference books through donations, and Wormington’s Prehistoric Indians shows up regularly enough to know it was genuinely widespread — but not so often that people stopped caring about it. The Denver Museum Popular Series format is itself a small piece of publishing history: institutional publications that outlasted many trade-press books because the institution kept them in print as long as visitors kept asking for them. If you collect Southwestern archaeology or the history of museum publishing, this is one of the anchor titles. If you’re interested in how we came to understand the cultures of Chaco, Mesa Verde, and the Gila — places I’ve grown up around as a fourth-generation New Mexican — Wormington is where it started for a lot of people.