ON THE RECORD ABOUT WALT TAYLOR: A PERSONAL ACCOUNT

Walter W. Taylor, especially through his 1948 monograph A Study of Archeology, has been a major influence on the theory and methods of American archaeology. His contribution has recently been assessed in a book by a number of students and colleagues, but none of them had first-hand experience with Walt in a fieldwork setting. This is an account of personal experiences with Walt Taylor, beginning in the graduate program at Southern Illinois University (SIU), but focused on a summer National Science Foundation (NSF) project in Zacatecas in 1964 that was designed to study Chalchihuites/Chichimec interactions in a frontier area, and what that fieldwork experience revealed about Walt Taylor as an archaeologist and as a person.