Louis Caywood

Louis Caywood

Quick Facts

Significance:

Archeologist

Place of Birth:

Brisbee, AZ

Date of Birth:

1906

Place of Death:

Globe, AZ

Date of Death:

1997

Born in Bisbee, Arizona in 1906, Louis R. Caywood in his practice and publications of historical sites archaeology, including the Hudson Bay forts in the Northwest, the mission sites in the Southwest, the historic Meductic site in Canada, and his work at Greenspring and Jamestown, Caywood became one of the early practitioners of historical archeology.

Caywood received a BS degree in business administration in 1932 from the University of Arizona and a MA in anthropology in 1933. Caywood started working as an archeologist in 1933 at Tuzigoot, the 13th-century A.D. pueblo in the Verde Valley near Clarkdale, with Edward H. Spicer, another University of Arizona graduate student. By July 1935 the fieldwork and ruin stabilization had been completed with Civil Works Administration labor, and a 119-page illustrated report published by Caywood and Spicer through the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and NPS, the latter now Caywood's full-time employer. This stands as a speed record for excavation and publication by any unit of Federal Relief archaeology in the 1930s and 1940s. Tuzigoot became a National Monument in 1940.

Caywood began his 34-year career working for the NPS in 1934 as a temporary summer ranger at Mesa Verde. Soon after, he became the site superintendent at Canyon de Chelly. He went on to supervise excavations at Fort Vancouver, Fort Spokane, and Fort Okanagan, Washington. In 1954-1955 he excavated the 17th-century English settlement at Jamestown, Virginia (part of Colonial National Historical Park) and nearby at Governor Berkley’s Greenspring plantation.

Other assignments took Caywood to Alaska to make survey reports on Sitka and on the Kenai Peninsula, and to Hawaii to make archaeological surveys of the islands of Oahu, Molakai, Maui, and Hawaii. On loan to the Branch of Historic Sites of Canada, he excavated the site of Meductic in the province of New Brunswick.

Projects within the NPS included Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, on Virginius Island, and excavation and stabilization work at Montezuma Castle, Tumacacori, Tonto National Monument in Arizona, and Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico. After a stint as superintendent of Ocmulgee National Monument, Georgia, from 1956 to 1961, he ended his career in 1969 at the NPS Southwest Archeological Center. Caywood died in Globe, Arizona in 1997.