User:Tillman/Nels C. Nelson

Nels Christian Nelson (April 9, 1875 - March 5, 1964) was a Danish-American archaeologist. Born near Frederica, Jutland, Denmark, the eldest child in a poor family, he was sent to work on an uncle's farm in Minnesota in 1892. There he started first grade at age 17, graduating from high school in 1901. He rode a cattle car to California, saved money from odd jobs, and entered Stanford University about 1903. He transferred to the University of California, Berkeley in 1905, became interested in anthropology, and went to work for John C. Merriam surveying middens around San Francisco Bay and on the California coast. Nelson later estimated he walked 3,000 miles for the survey. Nelson earned his Bachelor of Letters in 1907, and an M.L. in 1908.

In 1911, Nelson accepted a job with the American Museum of Natural History to do an archaeological survey of the upper Rio Grande valley of New Mexico, at a salary of US$1,600 per year. His new wife, Ethelyn Hobbs Nelson, would be his paid field assistant. Nelson excavated a number of Pueblo ruins in the Galisteo Basin, many of which were abandoned following the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. He also did some excavation at Chaco Canyon with Earl Morris.

Nelson pioneered the technique of stratigraphic excavation in America. During his work in the Galisteo Basin, he dug a series of 1-foot levels in trash mounds at archeological sites, classified all the pot shards he found  into seven types, and calculated their frequencies by levels. These resembled sections of normal distribution curves, and demonstrated that statistical analysis of data from arbitrary levels could reveal chronological change just as could data from physically distinct strata. This technique continues to be used to the present day.

The Nelsons joined Roy Chapman Andrews on his third expedition to Mongolia in 1925.

Nelson served as President of the American Anthropological Society, President of the Society for American Anthropology, President of the American Ethnological Society, and Vice President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Nelson retired from AMNH in 1943, and died in 1964 in New York, at age 89.

Notable publications
Nels C. Nelson, 1916, "Chronology of the Tano Ruins, New Mexico," American Anthropologist, vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 159-180