Tozzer, Alfred M.
Tozzer, Alfred M.
Alfred Marston Tozzer (1877-1954), American anthropologist and Mesoamerican specialist, is best known as an archeologist, although his earliest work was in ethnology and linguistics. His subsequent work in archeology, particularly his Maya research, is marked by an integrated anthropological view of extinct cultures. He did his first field work, a study of California Indian languages, following his graduation from Harvard in 1900; in the summer and fall of 1901 Tozzer did ethnological and linguistic work among the Navajo in the Pueblo Bonito area of New Mexico.
Late in 1901 Tozzer took his first field trip to Yucatan, as a traveling fellow of the Archaeological Institute of America. At this time the American consul and amateur archeologist E. H. Thompson owned the site of Chichen Itza, where Tozzer spent four months studying the Maya language. Thompson had begun to dredge the Cenote of Sacrifice at Chichen, thus providing Tozzer with his first exposure to Maya archeology. C. P. Bowditch, a patron of the Peabody Museum and a member of the Archaeological Institute, had suggested that the Maya hieroglyphic writing could perhaps be deciphered through study of an extant Maya group which had had no contact with Europeans and which might have preserved some knowledge of the ancient culture, perhaps of the writing system itself. Tozzer spent four years on a traveling fellowship of the Archaeological Institute, with the objective of locating and studying such a group. His ethnographic and linguistic work with the Lacandon Maya in the Lake Petha region of the Usumacinta —a group whose existence had previously been reported by Teobert Maler—and among the more acculturated but linguistically related Yucatec Maya provided the material for his doctoral dissertation, submitted at Harvard in 1904 and published in 1907 by the Archaeological Institute of America. In the fall of 1904 he studied with Franz Boas at Columbia University, where he worked on a grammar of the Maya language which was published in 1921 (see 1921a). He did additional field work in 1905, exploring the Lacandon area and studying the Tzeltal, Choi, and Chintal dialects.
Tozzer returned to teach a seminar in Maya anthropology at Harvard in 1905 and went on to spend a summer at the Archives of the Indies at Seville. His first basically archeological field work was undertaken in 1907 in New Mexico, on an expedition sponsored jointly by the Peabody Museum and the Archaeological Institute and under the direction of E. L. Hewitt; among Tozzer’s colleagues were S. G. Morley and A. V. Kidder. In 1909-1910 Tozzer became director of the Peabody Museum Central American Expedition in Guatemala and published reports of the expedition’s work at Tikal (1911) and at Nakum (1913 ). These studies were concerned with the correlation of dated inscriptions with changes in architectural styles; another achievement of this project was the discovery of the important site of Holmul, subsequently analyzed and reported by R. E. Merwin and G. C. Vaillant (see 1932).
For the next few years, Tozzer taught at Harvard and traveled and collected specimens in Mexico and Yucatan for the Peabody Museum. In 1910 he became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1913 he was appointed curator of Middle American Archaeology and Ethnology at the Peabody Museum. Tozzer then took a leave of absence from Harvard in 1913-1914 to succeed Boas as director of the International School of Archaeology and Ethnology in Mexico. His excavations at the Valley of Mexico site of Santiago Ahuizotla, which defined the characteristic Early Toltec ceramic type known as Coyot-latelco, were reported in 1921 (see 1921b). This was Tozzer’s last field work in Mesoamerica.
After two years in the Air Services during World War I, Tozzer returned to Harvard and shortly thereafter became chairman of the department of anthropology. In the years 1928 and 1929 he was president of the American Anthropological Association and at various times served as representative of the Association on the National Research Council and the Social Science Research Council. He continued his teaching and his work at the Peabody Museum; in 1942 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Tozzer’s annotated and indexed translation of Bishop Diego de Landa’s 1566 Relacidn de las cosas de Yucatan (see 1941) stands as a definitive work of Maya ethnohistorical scholarship. Landa’s work, comparable in importance to Bernardino de Saha-gun’s sixteenthcentury study of Aztec culture (see Sahagun, General History of the Things of New Spain) is probably the most important source dealing with the ethnology of sixteenth-century Yucatan and provided the key to those Maya glyphs, principally chronological and divinatory, that can at present be read.
During World War n Tozzer served in Hawaii with the Office of Strategic Services. He had married Margaret Castle of Honolulu in 1913, and frequent trips to the Pacific had given him considerable familiarity with the area. Following his return to Harvard in 1945, he continued in teaching and administrative posts until his retirement. In 1948 he was named professor emeritus.
Shortly before his death in 1954 he completed the study, published posthumously (1957), of the Chichen Itza Cenote of Sacrifice, the collections from which were then at the Peabody Museum. This work is a major synthesis of the preconquest history of Yucatan, drawing upon Maya codices, the ethnology of contemporary Maya groups, sixteenth-and seventeenth-century documents in Maya and Spanish, and archeological data from the Maya area as a whole and from central Mexico. Tozzer defined five phases of the growth and decline of Chichen Itza, beginning with its Maya foundations and continuing through its political dominance of Yucatan under Toltec invaders from Tula, Hidalgo. After the foundation of the site of Mayapan, Chichen lost its supremacy and retained importance only as a pilgrimage site. Representations of Maya and Toltec in sculpture and painting and architectural changes at the site provided the basis for Tozzer’s analysis of the changing relationships of these two groups in Yucatan.
While rejecting many of the conclusions of nineteenth-century unilineal evolutionists, such as L. H. Morgan, Tozzer accepted several of the major tenets of this school. In Social Origins and Social Continuities (1925) he stressed the superorganic nature of culture, as did Spencer and Tylor. He asserted that culture, as socially learned behavior, is distinct from biologically inherited traits and therefore must be studied independently of biological phenomena. He also rejected diffusion and migration of peoples as necessary and sufficient explanations of culture change at a time when such theories were popular in anthropological thinking. The body of Tozzer’s work shows his emphasis on the need for integrated study of all aspects of culture: ethnological, archeological, and linguistic.
Tozzer was a respected and popular teacher. A Festschrift entitled The Maya and Their Neighbors, presented to him in 1940, offers evidence of the wide influence he exerted on his students and contemporaries.
Barbara J. Price
[For discussion of the subsequent development of Tozzer’s ideas, seeurban revolution, article onearly civilizations of the new world; and the biography ofvaillant.]
WORKS BY TOZZER
1907 A Comparative Study of the Mayas and the Lacan-dones.New York: Macmillan.
1911 A Preliminary Study of the Prehistoric Ruins of Tikal, Guatemala: A Report of the Peabody Museum Expedition, 1909-1910.Harvard University, Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Memoirs, Vol. 5, No. 2. Cambridge, Mass. : The Museum.
1913 A Preliminary Study of the Prehistoric Ruins of Nakum, Guatemala: A Report of the Peabody Museum Expedition, 1909-1910.Harvard University, Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Memoirs, Vol. 5, No. 3. Cambridge, Mass. : The Museum.
1921a A Maya Grammar: With Bibliography and Appraisement of the Works Noted.Harvard University, Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Papers, Vol. 9, No. 16. Cambridge, Mass. : The Museum.
1921b Excavations of a Site at Santiago, Ahuitzotla, D. F., Mexico. U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin No. 74. Washington: Government Printing Office.
1925 Social Origins and Social Continuities.New York: Macmillan.
1941 Landa, Diego deLanda’s Relacidn de las cosas de Yucatan. A translation, edited with notes by Alfred M. Tozzer. Harvard University, Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Papers, Vol. 18. Cambridge, Mass.: The Museum. -” Written in 1566 and first published in Spanish in 1864.
1957 Chichen Itza and Its Cenote of Sacrifice: A Comparative Study of Contemporary Maya and Toltec. Harvard University, Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Memoirs, Vols. 11-12. Cambridge, Mass.: The Museum. -* Published posthumously.
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Maya and Their Neighbors.2d ed. (1940) 1962 Salt Lake City: Univ. of Utah Press. -> A Festschrift presented to Tozzer.
Merwin, Raymond E.; and Vaillant, George C. 1932 The Ruins of Holmul, Guatemala. Harvard University, Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Vol. 3, No. 2. Cambridge, Mass.: The Museum.
Phillips, Philip 1955 Alfred Marston Tozzer: 1877-1954. American Antiquity 21:72-80. → Contains a comprehensive bibliography of Tozzer’s works compiled by the Peabody Museum.
SahagÛn, Bernardino de (ca. 1538) 1950— General History of the Things of New Spain. Florentine Codex, translated from the Aztec into English, with notes and illustrations by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble. Monographs of the School of American Research, No. 14, Parts 2-6, 9-13. Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research. -” First written in Spanish and Aztec. The manuscript is kept in the Laurentian Library, Florence. First published in book form in the original languages in 1829-1830. Books 1-5, 7-10, and 12 have been published to date in English.