The American archaeologist Alfred Vincent Kidder (1885-1963) directed expeditions which excavated important prehistoric ruins in the American Southwest and Middle America.

Alfred Kidder was born on Oct. 29, 1885, in Marquette, Mich., the son of a mining engineer. He entered Harvard College with the intention of qualifying for the medical school but was appalled by the premedical courses, and so he applied for a summer job in archeology. He spent two successive summers in the mesa and canyon country of southwestern Colorado and southeastern Utah. He obtained his bachelor's degree at Harvard in 1908 and a doctorate in anthropology in 1914.

Kidder then embarked on a series of Peabody Museum expeditions to the Southwest, mostly in northeastern Arizona, where, with Samuel J. Guernsey, he established the validity of chronological cultural periods. Kidder brought to the attention of scholars in the United States and abroad that valuable deductions about the development of human...