Nels C. Nelson


Nels Christian Nelson was a Danish-American archaeologist.

Biography

Nelson was born near Fredericia, in the Fredericia municipality in the eastern part of Jutland, Denmark. He was 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 in about 1903. He transferred to the University of California, Berkeley in 1905. Nelson earned his Bachelor of Letters in 1907, and an M.L. in 1908.
Nelson 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. 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. 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, refined by Alfred V. Kidder at Pecos, continues to be used to the present day.
The Daxi culture, a Neolithic culture, located in the Qutang Gorge around Wushan, Chongqing, in China was discovered by Nels C. Nelson in the 1920s. The Nelsons joined Roy Chapman Andrews on his third expedition to Mongolia in 1925.
Nelson served as President of the American Anthropological Association, President of the Society for American Archaeology, President of the American Ethnological Society, and Vice President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Nelson served in a number of curatorial positions at American Museum of Natural History, ultimately as Curator of Prehistoric Archeology. He retired from AMNH in 1943, and died in 1964 in New York City, at age 89.

Notable publications