John Beach Rinaldo: Quintessential Culture Historian

Abstract

During an archaeological career that spanned four decades, John Beach Rinaldo (1912-1999) made substantive contributions to the delineation and definition of the Mogollon Culture, the culture history of west-central New Mexico and east-central Arizona, and the identification of material relationships between precolumbian cultures and modern-day Zuni. For a variety of reasons, Rinaldo is overshadowed by his Field Museum collaborator Paul Sidney Martin. As a result, historians of archaeology have failed to critically evaluate Rinaldo's career and contributions. This paper offers a controlled analysis and comparison of data in unpublished archives, artifact collections at the Field Museum, and the published record to illuminate previously unrecognized but important aspects of Rinaldo's many contributions to archaeological knowledge, method, and theory.