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Pre-Columbian Towers in the Southwest

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2017

Albert Schulman
Albert Schulman*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico
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Extract

Towers have long been an important and integral feature of architecture. The earliest record of towers is in Mesopotamia with the Statue of Gudea at a date of approximately 2700 B.C. (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1948, p. 330). From there they may be found ranging over the entire world. They have met numerous demands, but from their very beginning towers have served two principal functions: military and religious.

A focal area of tower building was in the southwestern United States. Here towers have presented numerous problems which, despite comment and work, still remain largely unanswered. Their intriguing possibilities, however, early attracted the attention of writers. A brief history would include such men as Jackson (1876), Holmes (1879), and Morgan (1881), who first called public attention to these towers. Their accounts were descriptive and mention ruins of the Hovenweep, Mesa Verde, and McElmo areas. Moorehead, in a series of six articles entitled “In Search of a Lost Race” for Illustrated American of 1892, discussed ruins of the McElmo.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 15 , Issue 4Part1 , April 1950 , pp. 288 - 297
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Archaeology 1950

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