Profile of Stephen E. Plog

Abstract

Within the confines of remote Chaco Canyon, large Pueblo great houses stand sentry among smaller dwellings, the palatial behemoths unoccupied and the nature of their growth and decline 1,000 years ago in this region of the American Southwest still under debate. In his Inaugural Article, archaeologist Stephen Plog, elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2007, uses evidence from burials within one of these great houses to assert that these societies were not as egalitarian as their more modern Pueblo counterparts are, but that they supported a social hierarchy (1). The dead can, and do, tell tales, yet with few archaeological excavations allowed in the Chaco Canyon in the past 20 years and for the foreseeable future, it is only with data from previous excavations that researchers can tease apart its history. Thanks to Plog, over 100 years’ worth of Chaco Canyon data, much of it previously unpublished, is now meticulously archived in a relational database and publicly available (www.chacoarchive.org), the result of a 7-year labor of love to ensure that Chaco Canyon remains an active virtual excavation. Stephen E. Plog (photograph courtesy of Tom Cogill). Plog, currently the David A. Harrison Professor of Archeology at the University of Virginia, spent the first 6 years of his life in Roswell, New Mexico, before moving to El Paso, Texas, with his family in 1955. Growing up amid the rich cultural history of the American Southwest, Plog could not escape talk of archeology. But it was his older brother, Fred, who wanted to be the archaeologist. “He started on the track earlier than I did,” says Plog, who entered Grinnell College (Grinnell, IA) with the intention of majoring in economics. Plog left Grinnell in 1968, midway through his first year, and enrolled at the University of Texas at El Paso to …