Long-time Plains Anthropological Society (PAS) member Mary Lou Larson unexpectedly passed away while attending the Society for American Archaeology meetings on 1 April 2022. Born on 18 August 1954 in Laramie, to Mary H. and University of Wyoming (UW) faculty member and Wyoming historian T.A. Larson, Mary Lou literally grew up on the UW campus. With primary interests in the ancient history of Wyoming, Mary Lou majored in anthropology at UW, earning her BA with honors in 1976. During her undergraduate years, she experienced all four fields of anthropology, took courses from George C. Frison and William T. Mulloy, and gained invaluable field experience on several of Frison's excavation projects. After graduation, she surveyed many acres of rugged Wyoming terrain while working for the Office of the Wyoming State Archaeologist.
Mary Lou began her graduate studies in anthropology at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 1978. There, she experienced the hunter-gatherer archaeology of the California coast while working for the UCSB Office of Public Archaeology, taking classes and serving as a teaching assistant. Mary Lou generally returned to Wyoming and the High Plains during the summer months, working in cultural resource management (CRM) for private consultants, with Dennis Stanford on several of his excavations, and as a research associate and field director for the UW Anthropology Department. Mary Lou completed her MA, from UCSB in 1982 and her PhD in 1990.
Starting in 1982, Mary Lou served as instructor/visiting assistant/adjunct professor in the UW Anthropology Department. In 1996, she was hired as an assistant professor, with tenure and an associate professorship awarded in 2000. By 2007, she had been named full professor and served as Department chair from 2011 to 2014. Mary Lou retired in 2020. During her career, she published five books, authored or co-authored dozens of journal articles and book chapters, innumerable technical reports and presented over 100 papers at regional, national, and international conferences. Mary Lou taught a variety of classes, ranging from world archaeology, European prehistory, method and theory, history of anthropological thought, Northwest Plains prehistory, lithic analysis, and spatial analysis and GIS classes to countless students. Twenty students earned their MA or PhD's under Mary Lou's supervision; she served as a committee member for another 13 students and mentored another six post/doctoral fellows or research associates. Mary Lou was an exacting teacher and mentor, demanding only the best from her students. She offered copious comments on drafts of papers, theses, and dissertations, with the expectation that all comments would be addressed. While sometimes frustrating to her students, her insightful reviews honed their logic and presentation and created solid anthropological thinkers.
The 1970s and 1980s saw the publication of several seminal volumes on bison kills and big game hunting by George Frison and his predominantly male students, including the 1978 edition of Prehistoric Hunters of the High Plains (Academic Press). These publications exerted a profound influence on Mary Lou's research interests. As she and I once mused, we did not want to study bones or big game hunting; we wanted to do something different. For Mary Lou, that was the less spectacular lithic scatters and features of the Archaic period from roughly 8000–1500 years ago. Beginning with her dissertation research on the Early Archaic age Laddie Creek site in the Big Horn Mountains, Mary Lou recognized the variability and complexity of hunting and gathering adaptations across Wyoming. Her research at the Helen Lookingbill site in the southern Absaroka Range, as well as several rock shelters in the Big Horns, expanded her focus to the transition from Pleistocene to early Holocene conditions and the important role of the high elevations for hunting and gathering adaptations. In 1997, she published Changing Perspectives on the Archaic of the Northwestern Plains and Rocky Mountains (co-edited with the author, University of South Dakota Press). This volume included articles by academic researchers and CRM practitioners. These ranged from theoretical models of hunter-gatherer adaptations and one of the earliest articulations of the Foothills-Mountain Paleoindian complex by George Frison, to the first refereed articles on the Early Archaic housepits and architecture discovered in central Wyoming. Mary Lou's unflagging desire to broaden the perceptions of the ancient history of Wyoming beyond big game hunting resulted in the 2010 revision and renaming (with Marcel Kornfeld and George Frison) of the third edition of Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers of the High Plains and Rocky Mountains (Left Coast Press).
The explosion of CRM in Wyoming beginning in the 1970s also profoundly influenced Mary Lou's career and professional service. In 1994, she organized and chaired the Southwest Wyoming Context Conference. This brought together 25 CRM practitioners from the public and private sectors to brainstorm research topics to guide evaluations of National Register significance for the thousands of prehistoric sites being discovered on a near-daily basis in the oil and gas fields of Wyoming. She worked with the Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) and the Bureau of Land Management to help develop computer systems and GIS datasets for the SHPO Cultural Records Office for use by researchers, students, and CRM practitioners.
After purchase of the Hell Gap site by the Wyoming Archaeological Foundation in the late 1990s, Mary Lou (along with George Frison and her partner and spouse of 43 years Marcel Kornfeld) began nearly 30 years of research at the site. Hell Gap is unusual among the large and well-reported Paleoindian sites on the Plains in that it is NOT a bison kill, and in keeping with her focus on the less glamorous aspects of Wyoming archaeology, the Hell Gap project addressed the day-to-day activities of ancient Americans living in the Hartville Uplift. The project began with analysis of the 1960s excavation records and collections of Cynthia Irwin-Williams and Henry Irwin, continued with highly targeted excavation to address specific research questions and culminated in the 2009 publication of Hell Gap: A Stratified Paleoindian Campsite at the Edge of the Rockies (University of Utah Press, 2009). This massive volume contains one of the most detailed records and analysis of stratigraphy, artifact assemblages, lithic raw materials, projectile point chronology, and paleo-environmental data spanning the Pleistocene and Holocene for any site in the Plains. Mary Lou's work at Hell Gap was central to the designation of the site as a National Historic Landmark in 2017 and to the current Save America's Treasures Project, in progress when she died, which will digitize the Hell Gap collections from 1960 to the present.
The Hell Gap volume epitomizes Mary Lou's approach to fieldwork, analysis, research, and writing – meticulous and cautious, with attention to detail and thorough evaluation of different hypotheses to explain observed patterning. These traits enabled her to tease out extremely detailed observations of stratigraphy, separate ephemeral cultural levels, and identify post-depositional impacts to buried deposits. Once these factors were understood, analysis and comparison of artifactual assemblages could proceed. In true Mary Lou fashion, this focused on the often ignored chipped stone debitage. Recognizing that one flintknapping episode produces thousands of flakes, she pioneered minimum analytical nodule analysis, a painstaking and labor-intensive system to sort debitage into specific nodules (e.g. unmodified chunks of toolstone, cores, preforms, etc.) based upon geologic raw material, color, texture, inclusions, and when possible, refits. This exercise can identify individual episodes of reduction or tool manufacture and reduces the analytical bias introduced by solely tabulating counts of flake types. This methodology will have a long-lasting impact on lithic analysis for many years.
Mary Lou was a lifetime member of PAS and served on the board of directors from 1998 to 2001. She also was a member of the Society for American Archaeology, the American Anthropological Association, and the Rocky Mountain Anthropological Association, serving on its board from 2018 to 2021. She served as an organizer for two Plains Conferences and two Rocky Mountain conferences. Collaboration with and outreach to the public and avocational communities was also a bedrock principle of Mary Lou's archaeological practice. She was a lifetime member of the Montana Archaeological Society and long-term member of the Wyoming Archaeological Society. She organized and facilitated student presentations for the annual WAS spring meetings for many years, and she and Marcel hosted WAS summer meetings at their field projects for over 30 years. Beginning in 2001, Mary Lou provided her archaeological expertise to the Wyoming National Register of Historic Places Review Board. Undoubtedly, her insightful reviews strengthened the nominations for many Wyoming properties now listed on the National Register. She was also working on a popular version of Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers of the High Plains and Rocky Mountains at the time of her passing.
Mary Lou endured major health issues throughout her entire professional career. With willpower and determination beyond my imagination, she never let her health prevent her from hitting the road, going to Hell Gap for field season, or attending the 2022 SAA meeting. Mary Lou and Marcel loved to entertain, and their home was the scene of many departmental gatherings, potlucks, and dinner parties with abundant good food, good wine, and spirited conversation. To honor her memory, Mary Lou's dear friends, colleagues, and former students across the country pitched in to build and install a bench and plaque on the east lawn of the George C. Frison Anthropology Building. Mary Lou's legacy will be long-lasting – through the students she trained, through expanding everyone's understanding of the Archaic and Wyoming prehistory as a whole, and through her bravery and grit. She will be sorely missed by all.
Selected bibliography of Mary Lou Larson
Larson, Mary Lou and Lucy Chronic (1984) The Plot Thickens: Computer Mapping and Artifact Patterning. Advances in Computer Archaeology 1–2:13–25. Arizona State University, Tempe.
Ingbar, Eric E., Mary Lou Larson, and Bruce Bradley (1989) A Non-Typological Approach to Debitage Analysis. In Experiments in Lithic Technology, edited by Dan Amick and Ray Mauldin, pp. 117–136. British Archaeological Reports Series 528, Oxford, England.
Larson, Mary Lou (1992) Site Formation Processes in the Cody to Early Plains Archaic Levels at the Laddie Creek Site (48BH345), Wyoming. Geoarchaeology 7(2):103–120.
Larson, Mary Lou and Eric E. Ingbar (1992) Perspectives on Refitting: Critique and a complementary approach. Piecing Together the Past: Application of Refitting Studies in Archaeology, edited by Jack L. Hofman and James Enloe, pp. 1–15. British Archaeological Reports International Series 578, Oxford, England.
Larson, Mary Lou (1994) Toward a Holistic Analysis of Chipped Stone Assemblages. In The Organization of North American Stone Tool Technology, edited by Philip J. Carr, pp. 57–69. International Monographs in Prehistory, Archaeological Series 7, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Larson, Mary Lou and Marcel Kornfeld (1994) Betwixt and Between: The Limits of Numic Expansion. In Across the West: Human Population Movement and the Expansion of the Numa, edited by David B. Madsen and David Rhode, pp. 200–212. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.
Ingbar, Eric E. and Mary Lou Larson (1996) Spatial Analysis of the Mill Iron Site. In The Mill Iron Site edited by George C. Frison, pp.15–24. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.
Larson, Mary Lou (1997) Housepits and Mobile Hunter-Gatherers: A Consideration of the Wyoming Evidence. Plains Anthropologist 42(161):353–369.
Larson, Mary Lou and Julie E. Francis (editors) (1997) Changing Perspectives on the Archaic of the High Plains. University of South Dakota Press, Vermilion.
Larson, Mary Lou and Marcel Kornfeld (1997) Chipped Stone Nodules: Theory, Method, and Several Northwest Plains Examples. Lithic Technology 22(1):4–18.
Kornfeld, Marcel, Mary Lou Larson, David J. Rapson, and George C. Frison (2001) 10,000 years in the Middle Rocky Mountains: The Lookingbill Site. Journal of Field Archaeology 28(3/4):307–324.
Hall, Christpher T. and Mary Lou Larson (editors) (2004) Aggregate Analysis in Chipped Stone Studies. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.
Kornfeld, Marcel and Mary Lou Larson (2007) Bonebeds and Other Myths: Paleoindian to Archaic Transition on the North American Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. Quaternary International 191:18–33.
Larson, Mary Lou, Marcel Kornfeld, and George C. Frison (editors) (2009) Hell Gap: A Stratified Paleoindian Campsite at the Edge of the Rockies. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.
Kornfeld, Marcel, George C. Frison, and Mary Lou Larson (2010) Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers of the High Plains and Rockies, revised third edition. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California.
Larson, Mary Lou (2012) The Paleoindian to Archaic Transition: Northwest Plains and Rocky Mountains. In From the Pleistocene to the Holocene: Human Organization and Cutlural Transformations in Prehistoric North America, edited by C. Britt Bousman and Bradley J. Vierra, pp. 149–170. Texas A&M Press, College Station.
Freeland, Nicholas P. Mary Lou Larson, Marcel Kornfeld, and Judy Wolf. (2014). National Historic Landmark Nomination: Hell Gap Site. Nomination Submitted to the Keeper of the Register, National Park Service, Department of the Interior, Washington D.C.
Spencer Pelton, Marcel Kornfeld, Mary Lou Larson, and Thomas Minckley (2017) An Absolute Occupational Chronology for Locality 1 of the Hell Gap Site, Wyoming, USA. Quaternary Research 88(2):234–247.
Kornfeld, Marcel, James M. Adovasio and Mary Lou Larson (2021) Perishable Artifacts from Last Canyon Cave, Pryor Mountains, Montana. Plains Anthropologist 66(260):373–389.