Gordon Willey

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Gordon Randolph Willey (7 March, 1913 – 28 April, 2002) was an American archaeologist famous for his fieldwork in South and Central America.

Willey received his bachelors Degree in 1935 and his Masters Degree in 1936 from the University of Arizona in Anthropology. He then got his Ph. D. from Columbia University in New York City. He worked as an anthropologist for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. and then went to teach at Harvard University.

He went on archaeological expeditions in Peru, Panama, Nicaragua, and Honduras. He received numerous awards, and was well known as a new world archaeologist and theorist, particularly for his studies in the pattern of settlements of native societies. He also wrote many books including some in the archaeology of North America.

Perhaps his most significant work was the 1953 work Prehistoric Settlement Patterns in the Viru Valley, Peru which launched the new archaeological interest in settlement patterns. This first major study of settlement patterns was a great bolster to the New Archaeology, associated with Lewis Binford among others because it focused not on the pottery chronologies of urban areas, but rather on the function of smaller satellite settlements and ceramic scatters across a landscape. This method continues in archaeology to this day.

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