Prominent Santa Fe archaeologist, museum leader helped shape groundbreaking Native remains laws

May 24—It played out like the scene of a Hollywood movie.

Duane Anderson, the newly appointed state archaeologist for Iowa who would later spend the final years of his career in Santa Fe, arrived at a site near Council Bluffs, Iowa. Work crews had unearthed what appeared to be an ancient Native American burial ground, and tension was thick in the air.

It was 1975, and Anderson was smack in the middle of a debate pitting the archaeological establishment, many of whom felt entitled to carry out scientific inquiries on the remains, against Native activists, who contended they should have the final say in the respectful reburial of their ancestors.

Anderson, who died earlier this month, recalled the moment in a 2012 radio interview.

"We had a lot of the looters or pot-hunters sort of standing by, ready to come in and take anything they could get if they had a break," he told Iowa Public Radio. "And we had a number of different Indian tribes represented standing around with their arms folded, demanding that something be done to protect these remains."

Anderson worked with famed Native American activist Maria Pearson, the de facto leader at the site, on a plan: Instead of using a bulldozer and backhoe, they would carefully excavate the remains, work to authenticate them, then go from there.

"That was kind of the beginning," Anderson said in the interview.

In the months that followed, both Pearson's leadership and Anderson's advocacy helped shape Iowa's groundbreaking reburial law laying out a process for how ancient Native burial sites should be treated. That law was later used as a model in dozens of other states and eventually followed by the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990.

The work wasn't entirely well-received by Anderson's peers at the time. But retired archaeologist and former colleague Joe Tiffany said Anderson was unflappable.

"Talk about being out there," said Tiffany, an Iowa resident who served as assistant state archaeologist under Anderson. "There's some things that's fun about being on the cutting edge and there's some things that's kind of hard. ... He just rolled with the punches."

Anderson later moved to Santa Fe where he led the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture and served as vice president of the School for Advanced Research. He died May 9 after a lengthy illness. He was 80.

From West to Midwest

Archaeology and museums were the throughlines of Anderson's life. He even found love on a dig, said Carol Anderson, his wife of nearly 60 years. Both were archaeology students at the University of Colorado when they were assigned as co-diggers at a Ute excavation site outside Montrose in the western half of the state.

He was "a very nice person, very serious, which I liked," Anderson, now 80, said in an interview. "He was smart, which I liked, and ambitious, which I liked."

The couple later married, and ended up in the Midwest when Duane Anderson took a job at the Sanford Museum and Planetarium in Cherokee, Iowa.

Anderson was appointed state archaeologist in 1975 as the archaeological establishment continued to grapple with the aftermath of the 1971 discovery of a burial ground and the controversial treatment of the bodies found there.

A highway crew had unearthed the remains of 28 people near Pacific Junction, not far from the Nebraska state line. Of those, 26 were determined to be non-Native settlers and were quickly reburied. But the remains of the two Native American people had instead been sent to the archaeology laboratory in Iowa City. It was a jumping off point for Pearson, a Yankton Sioux woman who would earn renown as an activist for Native American rights. She was infuriated by the disparate treatment, launching a larger conversation about Native people's rights to the remains of their ancestors.

In the 2012 interview, Anderson said the reigning attitude from archaeologists at the time was much different than it is today.

"It was pretty much generally felt at the time by most of the archaeologists that the graves were open for scientific investigation, that they had a right to do this and that the Indians shouldn't bother them," Anderson said. "They didn't feel that there was any real close connection between modern Indians and the ancient people."

In some quarters, Anderson said, there was a desire to change the laws and clarify what the state archaeologist's role should be.

After the Council Bluffs dustup and the Iowa law change, Anderson said he was scorned by some peers on the regional and national level.

"[When] we went to conferences, we would be scolded because we were reburying our database. We were reburying our artifacts. We were making archaeology difficult," he said. "So it wasn't very popular."

'Everything we did was archaeological'

Anderson's reburial work had national and ultimately lasting impact, but it wasn't his last stop. Carol Anderson said he took a job as director of the Dayton Museum of Natural History in Dayton, Ohio, where, among other projects, he built a visitors center at the SunWatch historic site.

After the couple moved to Santa Fe, Anderson did consulting work for re-accrediting a number of historic sites before taking a role as vice president of the School for Advanced Research, an archaeological center known at the time as the School for American Research.

He later became director of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe as well.

Once arrived in the New Mexico, Anderson threw himself into the world of local museums and archaeology — as did his wife.

"Everything we did was archaeological," she said. "We went over to Chaco and every place you could think of. ... It was fabulous."

Over the years, he wrote a number of books. Famous New Mexico potter Lonnie Vigil wrote the forward for All That Glitters: The Emergence of Native American Micaceous Art Pottery in Northern New Mexico, and Anderson collaborated with former Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist-turned-author Francis H. Harlow.

He built relationships with artists at Santa Ana Pueblo and helped encourage the pueblo to relaunch its pottery tradition after a period when it had somewhat lapsed, Carol Anderson said.

During his time at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Duane Anderson spearheaded the project to build the Museum Hill Cafe.

"His previous experience with museums is that people would come to the museum, and then they'd get hungry and leave," Carol Anderson said. "... It's kind of a destination, and people go up there because it's got such a great view."

Mike Larkin, a retired dentist who moved to Santa Fe and met Anderson after taking a "worker bee" job at the School for Advanced Research, said in addition to Anderson's formidable archaeological knowledge, he was a gifted administrator.

"He read people very, very well, and was able to have them go off on jobs that he knew they could take care of," said Larkin, who now lives in Rhode Island but who kept in touch with Anderson over the years. "He never said anything to praise himself. ... People really were drawn to him for that reason."