PROFILE
Profile of Patricia L. Crown
Jennifer Viegas, Science Writer
For more than four decades, Patricia Crown, a pro-
fessor of anthropology at the University of New
Mexico, has conducted field investigations in the
Ancestral Pueblo, Mogollon, and Hohokam areas of
the American Southwest. Her work has revealed
important aspects of these cultures concerning ce-
ramics, trade, rituals, diet, gender roles, and more.
Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in
2014, Crown five years earlier uncovered the first
evidence of chocolate consumption in North Amer-
ica north of Mexico. Crown has also conducted an
extensive analysis of organic residues from archaeo-
logical sites in the US Southwest and the Mexican
Northwest, revealing widespread use of cacao and
holly in communal, ritual gatherings dating from AD
750 to 1400.
Four Artists, One Archaeologist
Crown
’s father was an art professor at the University
of Southern California, as well as a landscape painter.
“He did most of his painting outside and often
took his three children along,
”
Crown says, adding that her
mother, a public school teacher,
was also an artist, as were her
two older sisters.
“I had no tal-
ent for painting,
” she says, “and
so had to amuse myself in
other ways.
”
One diversion was search-
ing for artifacts during summer
family camping trips to places
in the American Southwest. It
was during one such trip to
New Mexico when 15-year-
old Crown decided to be-
come an archaeologist after
years of being intrigued by
landscapes and ruins. She
says,
“My parents both en-
couraged me to do whatever I
was passionate about, and
that was archaeology. So I
read everything I could get
my hands on and only applied
to colleges that had good
archaeology programs.
”
Defying Expectations
Crown chose the University of Pennsylvania for her
undergraduate work, and earned her AB in anthro-
pology with honors in 1974. She had planned to at-
tend graduate school but was informed by an advisor
that there was no reason for her to continue her
studies because women in archaeology only worked in
laboratories. Crown turned to a graduate student for
advice, and she recommended that Crown go to the
University of Arizona. She followed the suggestion
and earned both her MA (1976) and PhD (1981) in
anthropology there.
During her studies in Arizona, Crown attended a
field school at Grasshopper Pueblo, where she was in-
vited to become a teaching assistant and to do a dis-
sertation project. For the project, she supervised
the excavation of Chodistaas Pueblo, where
∼200
ceramic vessels were unearthed. Interest in the ar-
tifacts led Crown to shift her dissertation topic from
migration to ceramic variability within the house-
holds at the site (1). Archaeologist and National
Academies of Science member Emil Haury (1904
–
1992) was Crown
’s primary mentor at the University
of Arizona. She says,
“He was not only an excep-
tional scholar, but also a highly ethical person who
provided a role model for all of his students. Doc
Haury particularly encouraged his students to write so
that a farmer in Kansas could understand what we were
talking about; I have tried to follow this advice.
”
Ceramics and Ideology
Before Crown finished her dissertation, she was hired
as an assistant archaeologist at the Arizona State
Museum, where she worked until 1985. She then
became an assistant professor of anthropology at
Southern Methodist University (1985
–1990), which
included running the university
’s field school in Taos,
New Mexico. Crown next accepted a position as an
assistant, and later associate, professor of anthro-
pology at Arizona State University. In 1993, she be-
came an associate professor at the University of New
Mexico, where she has remained.
One year after moving to New Mexico, Crown
authored the book Ceramics and Ideology: Salado
Polychrome Pottery (2). In the book she describes her
analysis of one of the most widely distributed types
of 13th century pottery in the southwestern United
Portrait of Patricia Crown. Image courtesy of
Wirt H. Wills (photographer).
This is a Profile of a recently elected member of the National Academy of Sciences to accompany the member
’s Inaugural Article on page 11436 in
issue 37 of volume 112.
9392–9394 | PNAS | August 23, 2016 | vol. 113 | no. 34
www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1611709113
PRO
F
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States. She says,
“I conclude that the pottery origi-
nated with migrants moving out of northern Arizona,
and it was widely adopted as part of a religious
movement that promoted peace during this time of
demographic upheaval.
” For the analysis and other
achievements, Crown was awarded the 1994 Society
for American Archaeology Award for Excellence in
Ceramic Research. Four years later she received the
Gordon R. Willey Award from the Archaeology Divi-
sion of the American Anthropological Association.
Roles of Women and Children in Prehispanic
Southwest
In 2000, Crown edited a volume (3) that explores the
role of women and men in southwestern US history.
Her contributions include the introduction, which ex-
amines issues of gender and power in archaeology,
and a chapter on women and cuisine that investigates
how women actively experimented with both foods
and food processing technologies to optimize the
nutritional benefits from the southwestern diet of corn,
beans, squash, and protein.
Crown has also investigated the lives of children
from the prehispanic American Southwest (4). Ethno-
graphic data on potters from the region revealed that
children began to make ceramics at around age 6.
Youths received little formal artistic instruction, but
instead learned largely by observation and imitation.
The amount of adult involvement in the teaching
process varied from one part of the Southwest to an-
other, with skilled potters sometimes collaborating
with learners to finish a vessel.
The work made Crown question the assumption
that individual craftspeople made each pot (5). She
says,
“Multiple artisans may contribute to a finished
object, and different people may modify objects
over time. Collaborative vessels help us understand
labor demands, learning and teaching frameworks,
specialized production, and the life histories of
ceramic vessels.
”
Early Evidence for Chocolate Consumption
When Crown was three years old, she and her family
visited Chaco Canyon, a complex of multistory ma-
sonry dwellings built by the ancient Puebloans that is
now designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. De-
cades after the visit, Crown
’s husband Wirt H. Wills,
also a southwestern archaeologist on the faculty at the
University of New Mexico, led six field sessions reex-
cavating trash mounds at a large village within Chaco
Canyon known as Pueblo Bonito. Regarding Wills,
Crown says,
“He remains my most valued consultant
and critic.
” A book concerning the trash mound ex-
cavations was recently published (6). Among the finds
in the trash mounds were fragments of rare ceramic
vessels known as Chacoan cylinder jars.
Crown and colleague W. Jeffrey Hurst, who was a
senior chemist for the Hershey Company, analyzed
some of these cylinder jar sherds (7). Researchers had
speculated that the vessels once held sacred objects
like turquoise or were covered with animal skin and
used as drums. Crown studied the jar wear patterns
and became convinced that they were used in another
way. She also consulted with Mayan history scholar
Dorie Reents-Budet at the Museum of Fine Arts in
Boston, who had analyzed similar vessels. Reents-
Budet informed Crown that the Maya used such con-
tainers for serving a beverage made out of fermented,
roasted, and ground cacao nibs.
HPLC and MS testing overseen by Hurst confir-
med the presence of theobromine in three sherds of
the Chaco Canyon jars. Theobromine is a compound
obtained from cacao nibs and therefore serves as a
biomarker for chocolate. The research not only pro-
vided proof of chocolate use in North America north
of the Mexican border, but it also confirmed the
former existence of a Mesoamerican trade network
that connected Chaco in the north to cacao-growing
regions in the south.
The
“Black Drink”
A few years later, Crown and Hurst, along with other
colleagues, studied plant residues on pottery beakers
from Cahokia, a massive pre-Columbian settlement
near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi
Rivers (8). Residues on the beakers revealed that they
once contained Yaupon holly. The leaves of this plant,
which have high amounts of caffeine, are traditionally
roasted and made into a potent tea known as the
“black drink.” Historical documents indicate that the
beverage was drunk as part of a purification ritual
before battles and other important events.
For Crown
’s Inaugural Article, she and her team ex-
tended the earlier work at Chaco Canyon and Cahokia
to include organic residue analysis from pottery frag-
ments unearthed at 18 sites in the US Southwest and
Mexican Northwest with funding from the National
Science Foundation (9). Crown says,
“We argue that
there is strong evidence for trade and consumption of
two different caffeinated plants into this area: cacao,
Excavations in room 28 of Pueblo Bonito; Patricia Crown is in the orange vest.
Image courtesy of Wirt H. Wills (photographer).
Viegas
PNAS | August 23, 2016 | vol. 113 | no. 34 | 9393
used to make chocolate drinks, and Yaupon holly.
” She
and her team believe that caffeinated drinks were im-
portant to pre-Hispanic individuals and were consumed
largely in communal, ritual, and political contexts, where
they functioned as social tools.
Ritual Closure in Pueblo Bonito
Crown
’s present work involves studying a room in
Pueblo Bonito that housed 66% of all known Chacoan
cylinder jars. Originally excavated in 1896, the room
was reexcavated by Crown
’s team in 2013 with fund-
ing from the National Endowment for the Humanities
and National Geographic. Crown
’s work suggests that
the room
’s inhabitants practiced ritual closure through
fire, probably around AD 1100.
While describing this project and others, Crown
expresses her enduring fondness for the University of
New Mexico, as well as for her chosen home state.
She marvels that her primary research site is a short
drive away from her house. She says,
“Not only does
New Mexico respect and honor its past, but it is an
epicenter for creativity in both art and science, and
has been for over 1,000 years. I
’m also fortunate to
practice archaeology at a time when advances in
scientific techniques offer so many new ways to an-
swer questions about the past.
”
1 Crown PL (1981) Variability in Ceramic Manufacture at the Chodistaas Site, East-Central Arizona. PhD dissertation (University of Arizona,
Tucson).
2 Crown PL (1994) Ceramics and Ideology: Salado Polychrome Pottery (Univ of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque).
3 Crown PL, ed (1998) Women and Men in the Prehispanic Southwest: Gendered Perspectives on Labor, Power, and Prestige in the
American Southwest (School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, NM).
4 Crown PL (2000) Children in the prehistoric Puebloan Southwest. Learning and Teaching in the Prehispanic American Southwest, ed
Kamp K (Univ of Utah Press, Salt Lake City), pp 108
–124.
5 Crown PL (2007) Life histories of pots and potters: Situating the individual in archaeology. Am Antiq 72(4):677
–690.
6 Crown PL, ed (2016) The Pueblo Bonito Mounds of Chaco Canyon (Univ of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque).
7 Crown PL, Hurst WJ (2009) Evidence of cacao use in the Prehispanic American Southwest. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 106(7):2110
–2113.
8 Crown PL, et al. (2012) Ritual black drink consumption at Cahokia. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 109(35):13944
–13949.
9 Crown PL, et al. (2015) Ritual drinks in the pre-Hispanic US Southwest and Mexican Northwest. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 112(37):
11436
–11442.
9394 | www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1611709113
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