M. R. (Mark Raymond) Harrington

Born in 1882, Mark Raymond Harrington built a long career as an archaeologist and anthropologist at several major museums, including the Peabody Museum at Harvard, the American Museum of Natural History, the Museum of the American Indian, and later the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles. Smithsonian materials describe him as a prominent twentieth-century anthropologist whose career moved across many of the leading institutions of his field.

Harrington is especially remembered for fieldwork that combined excavation with close attention to Indigenous communities and traditions. He worked in the American Southwest, the Great Basin, the Northeast, Oklahoma, and Cuba, and he published on subjects ranging from Lenape religion and ceremony to major archaeological investigations such as Lovelock Cave and Ozark bluff dwellings. His writing helped bring together archaeology, ethnography, and museum collecting in a way that reached both scholars and general readers.

He died in 1971, but his papers, correspondence, and publications still offer a vivid record of early twentieth-century anthropology. For listeners interested in older nonfiction, his work opens a window onto the methods, ambitions, and discoveries of archaeology in his era.