ALBERTO REX GONZÁLEZ, DEAN OF SOUTH AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGY

Abstract

1 Nota del Editor: Este comentario/obituario esta basado en una carta de apoyo a la postulacion de Alberto Rex Gonzalez al premio Lifetime Achievement Award Society for American Archaeology enviada por el autor al comite ad hoc de la Sociedad Americana de Arqueologia en diciembre de 2008. 2 Rebecca Webb Wilson University Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Religion, and Culture and Professor of Anthropology and Latin American Studies, Department of Anthropology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37325, Tel: 615-3228379. tom.d.dillehay@Vanderbilt.Edu neighboring countries such as Chile, Bolivia, and Uruguay made him an international figure. A man of great wit and warmth, as well as learning, he trained generations of anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians. He was a master synthesizer, and his major works contained many of his most provocative and influential writings. Outside of South America, he was perhaps best known for his research into the Formative cultures of Northwest Argentina, the La Aguada post-Formative culture, and art and iconographic analyses of a wide range of archaeological materials. For many of us, one of the most important features of Rex’s approach to anthropology was that he always maintained an empirical dimension without becoming atheoretical. He was always focused on data collection, which necessitated intensive and extensive fieldwork. Beginning in the late 1940s, Rex built on the work of other scholars to establish the basic groundwork for an understanding of the major attributes of several important cultures, including Tafi, Cienega, Condorhuasi, Belem, among others. His field collaborations with other scholars were of such scope that many widely used terms for archaeological cultures derive from these investigations. Terminologically, then, he leaves an indelible imprint on the archaeology of South America. He also laid the empirical and theoretical groundwork for understanding one of the earliest complex societies of Northwest Argentina –the La Aguada culture. In recent decades, Gonzalez’s middle-range theoretical interests in comparing and dating cultures led him to pioneer innovative ways of analyzing artifacts. To trace relatedness and change in cultures through ceramic classification, for instance, he defined many type-variety ceramic models in Northwest Argentina. For Gonzalez, the comparative Dr. Alberto Rex Gonzalez was an Argentine archeologist and anthropologist who I knew for more than thirty years. His intellectual and professional achievements and influences are highly worth honoring and remembering here. Dr. Alberto Rex Gonzalez was the Dean of southern cone South American archaeology and the founding father of modern Argentine archaeology. For over 60 years, his experience in archeology focused on the first human populations in the southern cone, the beginnings of complex societies in the Andes, and the art and symbolism of those societies. He supervised, oversaw, or helped to arrange archeological excavations at sites all over Argentina. Rex’s long distinguished career in anthropological archaeology established the first basic chronology for most of Argentina. He meticulously documented cultural sequences for contiguous regions in Northwest Argentina, northern Patagonia, southern Bolivia, and northern Chile, and once radiocarbon dating became more available in the 1950s and 1960s, he was able to substantiate the timing of migrations and diffusions over considerable distances. He also was one of the major players in the debates surrounding the development and application of the period/ horizon style concept in Andean archaeology. Yet, his interests were not purely in formal chronology and phase building. Early in his career, he was concerned with questions of diffusion, migration, environmental change, political economy, symbolism, and others. As a consequence, he helped to place the archeology of Argentina and particularly Northwest Argentina on the South American map and in the international arena. Although his archeological and anthropological research were largely concentrated in Argentina, his professional visits and talks and his widespread development of students and proteges in Volumen 44, No 2, 2012. Paginas 205-208