Florence Hawley Ellis Circle
The Anthropology Department honors our $1000 donors by inducting them into the newly named Florence Hawley Ellis Circle. A list of donors has been placed on an engraved plaque in the main Anthropology office.

About Florence Hawley Ellis
Florence Hawley Ellis was born September 17, 1906 in Cananea, Mexico, where her father was employed as a mining chemist. After the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution, her parents moved to Miami, Arizona in 1913. She was introduced to archeology by her father who spent his Sundays excavating ruins in the area around their southern Arizona home. Later, while working on her thesis she collaborated with her father in the chemical analysis of pottery pigments.

Florence Ellis was a pioneer in applying her techniques of chemical analysis, dendrochronology, ethnohistory, and ethno-archeology to her research. She distinguished herself as a major authority on Southwestern archeology and ethnology. And she was honored by the “Daughters of the Desert” symposium as a leader among women anthropologists who have worked in the Southwest.

Though antedating the “Women’s Movement” of the 1960s, she played an enormous role over the years as a woman striving for equal economic and professional recognition of women and men. Through her excellence in teaching and research, through her tenacity, and through her dedication to the idea of equality, she was among those Southwestern professional women who first achieved the more salient goals of the women’s movement.

Florence graduated from the University of Arizona in 1927 with a major in English and a minor in anthropology. By finishing her M.A. the next year, she was able to start teaching at the University of Arizona at an annual salary of $1500. She was also able that year to join A.E. Douglass’ first class in dendrochronology. She applied this training to tree ring analysis in the Chaco Canyon excavations during the period from 1929-1940. When the depression forced faculty layoffs, Florence decided to take her savings and complete a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. Based on her field experience, she had the first draft of a dissertation in hand when she arrived. The dissertation, on the dated prehistory of Chetro.

Quite possibly more United States professional anthropologists were taught by Professor Ellis than by any other member of the profession. During her career she was responsible for over 20 different courses, and during World War II she also took over several courses usually taught by male faculty members, such as the American Indian, Physical Anthropology and Osteology courses. At one point she was found to be teaching more courses than anyone else in the department. She was never static as a teacher—each year her courses were taught in a manner that brought the latest theoretical approaches and her own ideas into focus. Her research constantly provided stimulation for her students, as well as herself. Her courses were filled with a myriad of facts and personal anecdotes. When it was exam time, students often displayed mild hysteria, because of the amount of material. Her students knew that they would not be “spoon fed,” and that they would be expected to chart, organize and comprehend the data, as well as to become familiar with supportive bibliographical materials. Her exams stressed thinking with the data, rather than straight regurgitation, and thus to survive, the students were forced to learn to think.

From the late 1950s through the decade of the 1960s Prof. Ellis directed UNM’s summer archeological field school Perhaps the most notable field school project was the discovery and excavation, near San Juan Pueblo, of San Gabriel de Yungue, the first Spanish capital of New Mexico, dating from 1600.

Although as a professional woman she was a pioneer in the field, she also suffered discrimination as a woman. Ellis was promoted after some of her male colleagues who had been at UNM less time. Even in the mid 1960s she was still earning less than $10,000 when all her male colleagues were earning more than that.

Retirement in 1971 did little to slow her down. Florence continued to excavate and to write, particularly concentrating her efforts on the Gallina culture of the Jemez Plateau and early Tewa occupation of the Chama River valley. By the 1980s her work was based in and around the Ghost Ranch of Abiquiu, where she continued to offer field training to interested students and advocational archeologists. One season she suffered a broken hip, but indefatigable in her dedication to the field investigation, she insisted on returning during her recuperation to supervise the field work. The Ghost Ranch constructed a large museum complex bearing her name and housing her extensive library, archeological and ethnological collections. The Ghost Ranch also administers three memorial funds to perpetuate her legacy, the “Florence H. Ellis Museum Endowment Fund”, the “Florence Hawley Ellis and Andrea Ellis Fellowship for Researcher in Residence at the Florence Hawley Ellis Museum of Anthropology,” and the “Florence Hawley Ellis and Andrea Ellis Pueblo Indian Scholarship Fund.”

Prof. Ellis served as President of the American Society for Ethnohistory in 1969 (cf. Ethnohistory 13(4):295-307, 1971). In 1987 she was honored as one of 45 distinguished women featured in a traveling Smithsonian exhibit titled “Daughters of the Desert,” accompanied by a symposium on the same topic held in Albuquerque. The University of New Mexico recognized her accomplishments by granting her an honorary Doctorate of Letters in 1988. She died quietly at the home of her daughter in Albuquerque in 1991.