Americas
In 1780 Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), later president (1801-9) of the United States, explored an Indian burial mound near his Virginia estate, Monticello. Instead of the common practice of simply digging downwards until something was found, he dug a trench across the mound so that he could see the layers of occupation and draw conclusions from them.
Ephraim George Squier (1821-88) and Edwin Hamilton Davis (1811-88) studied hundreds of mounds and enclosures in the Mississippi and Ohio valleys and published their results in Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (1848).
In 1839 John Lloyd Stephens (1805-52) accompanied by the artist Frederick Catherwood (1799-1854) went to Central America and documented dozens of ruins, many for the first time. Their researches were published in Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan (1841). A further expedition resulted in Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (1843).
From 1915 to 1929 Alfred Vincent Kidder (1885-1963) excavated an abandoned pueblo in Pecos, near Santa Fe, New Mexico, which revealed levels of human occupation at the pueblo going back more than 2000 years. From 1929 to 1950 he organised broad-scale excavations at sites in the Guatemalan highlands to obtain a new perspective of the chronological range and origins of the Maya culture.
In 1892 Max Uhle (1856-1944) began collecting archaeological and ethnographic artefacts in Argentina and Bolivia. He later worked at Tiahuanaco and Pachacamac, where stratigraphic excavation of the latter produced the evidence from which Uhle derived a chronological sequence for the region.
Oceania
The three voyages of Captain James Cook (1728-79) established a tradition of systematic exploration and recording. During his first voyage (1768-71) he explored the Society Islands, charted New Zealand and mapped the east coast of Australia. On the second voyage (1772-5) he explored the Pacific extensively. The aim of the final voyage (1776-9) was to look for a northern route between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans (‘Northwest Passage’). No navigable route was found and Cook was killed by the Hawaiians in 1779. Cook’s ship returned to England eighteen months later, in October 1880.
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