Trailing footprints from the past.

• Author: Bach, Caleb
• Position: Archaeologist Alberto Rex Gonzalez

FOR OVER HALF A CENTURY, ALBERTO REX GONZALEZ HAS CHARTED THE COURSE FOR ARCHAEOLOGY IN THE SOUTHERN CONE

I am here, following the footsteps of these who have gone away, I am walking along the path left by those who have gone away, I follow the trail of their footsteps, Those who have gone away talk to me from far off, Those from the infinite have been talking to me, The footsteps of those who have gone away are here

To Alberto Rex Gonzalez, this song fragment of an Ona shaman from Tierra del Fuego reflects the archaeologist's respect for those who have gone before. Referred to by his students and colleagues as the "Father of Southern Cone Archaeology," Gonzalez has left an indelible mark upon his profession through more than fifty years of inspired hard work.

Curiously, unlike the soldiers of fortune or autodidactic diggers who uncovered important sites earlier in this century--Hiram Bingham at Machu Picchu, for example--Gonzalez has no discovery of a mythic ruin to his credit. Rather, he sought the best academic training available to his generation and then applied it to impose order upon the confusion of sites and accumulated artifacts throughout his country. At each stage of the archaeological process he introduced new scientific techniques and, most critically, he passed these innovative procedures on to younger generations. As beneficiaries of his vast practical and theoretical knowledge, Gonzalez's progeny today continue his important work.

"Rex," as friends affectionately call him, was bitten by the excavator's bug as a teenager in the town of Pergamino in the Province of Buenos Aires. He was born there in 1918. His father, a railroad employee who admired King Albert I of Belgium, decided to name his son Alberto Rex. The youth became captivated by tales of mastodons and other Pleistocene creatures of the pampa, which he discovered in a fascinating book by Argentine anthropologist Florentino Ameghino. Paleontology led to archaeology and soon, while still in high school, he was involved in a controlled dig to recover pre-Columbian remains at a site called Paradero, near the city of Cordoba. He carefully collated and published his findings, just the first of over one hundred scholarly articles and books during his career.

"I wanted to be an anthropologist," Gonzalez recalls, "but in Argentina the field had not yet been invented." Instead, at the Universidad de Cordoba he earned a degree in medicine, a background that later served him well as he investigated health conditions of ancient peoples. Thanks to a scholarship, Gonzalez went on to New York City in 1946 to study anthropology at Columbia University. While working on his doctorate, he met some of the near-legendary figures in the Americanist branch of anthropology: Wendell Bennett, Julian Steward, Leslie White, and Alfred Metraux.

Given the roughly one-million-square-mile expanse of Argentina it must have been daunting for this young professional to decide just where to make his first foray. But then, with logic, he decided to study the earliest stage of Argentine prehistory, a phase largely ignored by previous investigators. If indeed evidence demonstrated early man first reached North America by way of a Siberian land bridge perhaps twenty to twenty-five thousand years ago, then when did these nomadic hunter-gatherers reach the southernmost part of the landmass?

Initially, Gonzalez spent four months in the windswept reaches of Patagonia collecting data to answer...