Harriet Cosgrove

Who was Harriet Cosgrove?

θHarriet 'Hattie' Siliman Cosgrove was an archaeologist trained in the Southwestern United States. Her fascination for archeology first started when she moved to Silver City, New Mexico, in 1906 with her husband Cornelius.

In 1919 the Cosgroves bought land in Grant County, New Mexico and began excavating Mimbres Valley ceramics. The Mimbres Valley has pre-Columbian culture dating from 200AD to 1150AD. The Cosgroves reportedly spent their free time exploring the Mimbres Valley with their son, Burton Cosgrove, Jr. In the 1920s the Cosgroves met Alfred Vincent Kidder, at the time curator of North American Archeology at Harvard's Peabody Museum. Kidder was extremely impressed with the Cosgroves' amateur archaeological work on Mimbres culture; the Cosgroves were later hired in 1924 by Harvard University’s Peabody museum through the help of Kidder. Harriet was among the first women in the field of archeology to be professionally employed. She than began professionally excavating sites for the Harvard Peabody Museum, beginning with an expedition in the Mimbres Valley.

The Cosgroves’ first professional archaeology endeavor was to excavate the Swarts Ruin, also known as the Swarts Ranch Ruin. The Swarts Ruin was part of the Mimbres Valley, however cultural artifacts of this area of the site suggest that the culture was only active between 1000AD – 1150AD in that area. The Swarts excavation established the Cosgroves as elite Southwestern Archaeologists as well as solidifying their image as a team unit. The site was photographically documented by Cornelius and Harriet made ink drawings of every bowl excavated, totaling over 700 Swarts Ruin pots. In total, nearly 10,000 artifacts were found and chronologically recorded by season. Extremely thorough notes were also taken by Harriet pertaining to room locations on the site, dimensions of these rooms, and the floor’s soil type; this was done for all burial sites discovered by the Cosgroves. The finds of the site were published in 1932 as “The Swarts Ruin: A Typical Mimbres Site in Southwestern New Mexico” which detailed the findings from 1924–1927 by season. The excavation was deemed “prodigious” and is still used as the primary reference for Mimbres Scholars.