Professions

Adolph Francis Alphonse Bandelier (August 6, 1840 – March 18, 1914) was an American archaeologist after whom Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico is named.

Bandelier was born in Bern, Switzerland. When a youth he emigrated to the United States. After 1880 he devoted himself to archaeological and ethnological work among the Indians of the southwestern United States, Mexico and South America. Beginning his studies in Sonora (Mexico), Arizona and New Mexico, he made himself the leading authority on the history of this region, and — with F. H. Cushing and his successors — one of the leading authorities on its prehistoric civilization.

In 1892 he abandoned this field for Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru, where he continued ethnological, archaeological and historical investigations. In the first field he was in a part of his work connected with the Hemenway Archaeological Expedition and in the second worked for Henry Villard of New York, and for the American Museum of Natural History of the same city. Bandelier had shown the falsity of various historical myths, notably in his conclusions respecting the Inca civilization of Peru.