John Alden Mason Papers, American Philosophical Society

Table of contents

Abstract

An archaeological anthropologist and linguist, John Alden Mason spent the majority of his career at the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania. After receiving his undergraduate degree at Penn in 1907, Mason received a doctorate at Berkeley (1911) for his ethnographic work on the Salinan Indians of California, but his diverse interests in later years ran the gamut from Puerto Rican folklore to Piman languages and cultures (including Pima, Papago, Pima Bajo, Northern and Southern Tepehuan, and Tepecano), Mayan, Aztec, and Incan archaeology, and the languages of South American Indians. Mason was curator of the University Museum at Penn from 1926 until his retirement in 1958.

The Mason Papers include both in-coming and outgoing correspondence, linguistic material, notes, and photographs relating to Mason's work in the southwestern U.S., northern Mexico, and South America. Centered on the years after Mason's return to Philadelphia in 1926, the collection covers all aspects of Mason's professional life, from reports on field work to answering casual questions referred to him through the University Museum to data and analyses on Piman and other languages. The collection also contains voluminous files relating to the Mason's editorship of the American Anthropologist (bulk: 1945-1948). Of special note are a series of class notes (1908-1910) kept by Mason for course work in ethnology, archaeology, and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania under Edward Sapir and Frank Speck.

Background note
Scope & content
Administrative information
Additional information
Added entries
Contact information
Collection overview
- Series I. Correspondence, 1926-1967
- Series II. Latin-American Institute for Race and Culture Studies, 1934-1935
- Series III. Linguistics, 1935-1958
- Series V. Card files and Notebooks, 1911-1951
- Series VI. Class notes, 1904-1910
- Series VII. Photographs, 1913-1951
- Series VIII. Audio recordings, 1948-1951
Collection inventory
- Series I. Correspondence, 1926-1967
- Series II. Latin American Institute for Race and Culture Studies, 1921, 1934-1936
- Series III. Linguistics, 1935-1958
- Series IV. Card Files and Notebooks, 1911-1951
- Series V. Class Notes, 1904-1910
- Series VI. Photographs, 1913-1951
- Series VII. Audio Recordings, 1948-1958

Background note

John Alden Mason (r.) and Burt Bascom, 1951
(Northern Tepecano) Abarca, Soledad

The archaeologist John Alden Mason was Curator of the University Museum at the University of Pennsylvania from 1926 until 1955. His research centered on the languages and cultures of the Indians of the American southwest and Mexico, including the Pima Bajo, Pima, Papago, Northern and Southern Tepehuan, and Tepecano.

Born at Orland, Ind., on Nov 16, 1887, Mason was a naturalized Philadelphian. A graduate of Central High School, he received his bachelors degree at the University of Pennsylvania in 1907, and after being beated out by Frank Speck for a Harrison Fellowship, took a position as photographer to Prof. George Byron Gordon as a means of earning money to further his education. During the next two years, Mason took classes under Speck and Edward Sapir (who arrived at Penn in 1908), and spent the field season of 1909 with Sapir working on Uintah Ute linguistics and culture. His industry paid off, and in 1910, he won a scholarship to complete doctoral studies at the University of California, where, under the direction of Alfred Kroeber, he completed a dissretation on the ethnography and languages of the Indians of central California. His dissertation resulted in his first monograph, The Ethnology of the Salinan Indians (Berkeley: Univ. of Calif., 1912), which was quickly followed by a monograph on the Mutsun dialect of Coastanoan, and later by The Language of the Salinan Indians (Berkeley: Univ. of Calif., 1918).

Even while studying for his doctorate, however, the horizons of Mason's research began to expand beyond California to include the languages and cultures of the southwestern states and Mexico. He undertook his first major expedition after receiving his degree to Jalisco, Mexico, where, with the encouragement of Franz Boas, he conducted research on the Tepecano Indians in 1911 and 1912, hoping to produce a grammar of the language and to study Tepecano religion. Despite Boas's support, however, Mason was unable to land an academic job. of Boas and Sapir arranged for Mason to continue productively, undertaking an expedition to the Great Slave Lake in 1913, and to Puerto Rico in 1914-1915 to research folklore andhysical anthropology.

Tepecano village
Jalisco, Mexico, ca.1917

After subsisting on grant funds and fellowship support from his old department at Berkeley, Mason landed his first professional appointment as assistant curator of Mexican and South American Anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History (1916-1923), after which he became assistant curator of Mexican and Central American Archaeology at the American Museum of Natural History, 1924-1925. Despite the demands of his curatorial duties, Mason initiated several important new projects, taking part in the Field Museum's archaeological expedition to Santa Marta, Columbia,in 1922-1923, and in 1918, initiating what would become many years of research on the Pima and Papago languages (the northern relatives of Tepecano and Tepehuan). Intending his research as part of a broader study of Uto-Aztecan languages, Mason worked closely with Juan Dolores, Ruth Underhill, and others well into the 1950s.

In 1926, Mason returned to Philadelphia to become Curator at the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, and despite the hardships of the Depression years, continued to expand his circle of interests, both linguistic, ethnographic, and archaeological. Having taken an increasing interest in Meso-American and South American archaeology since his discovery of some an important archaeological site in Puerto Rico, Mason's most productive research during the late 1920s until his retirement centered on Mayan archaeology (including work at Chichen Itza, Uxmal, and Palenque), although he worked on Aztec and Incan materials as well.

During his career, Mason published regularly in journals including The Museum Journal, Journal of American Folklore, International Journal of American Linguistics, and the American Anthropologist, of which was editor from 1945 through 1948. A fellow and vice president of the American Anthropological Assocation (1944) and president of the Society of American Archaeologists (1944), Mason retired from the University Museum in 1958, but remained active for several years thereafter as field adviser to the New World Archeology Foundation.

Mason married Florence Roberts on December 23, 1921, in Chicago, Ill., with whom he had a son and daughter. He died at the Bryn Mawr hospital at age 82

Scope and content

The product of fifty years of research in the languages and cultures of Indians of the American southwest and Mexico, the John Alden Mason Papers are a diverse... The collection includes a thorough run of Mason's professional correspondence from the late 1920s until his retirement in 1958, with some correspondence from earlier and later periods, as well as field notes, photographs, and audio recordings.

The focus of much of Mason's linguistic research after 1916 was on the Sonoran (Uto-Aztecan) languages of northern Mexico and the southwestern United States, including Pima, Papago, Pima Bajo, Northern and Southern Tepehuan, Tepecano, and Yaqui, and the collection contains texts, lingusitic notes, and correspondence relating to each. Literate and engaging, Mason's letters from the field are particularly valuable for providing an insight into his perspective on field research, but also on the cultural, economic, and social conditions of

Including both incoming letters and retained copies of outgoing, Mason's correspondence with Franz Boas, Alfred Kroeber, and Edward Sapir is particularly useful, and his most voluminous correspondent, Linton Satterthwaite, provides outstanding descriptions of his fieldwork in Mayan archaeology in southern Mexico and Guatemala during the 1930s. His even more voluminous files from the late 1940s when he was editor of American Anthropologist relate primarily to articles submitted to the journal and peer reviews.


Series I. Correspondence	1926-1967	20 linear feet
Series II. Latin American Institute for Race and Culture Studies	1921, 1934-1936	0.5 linear feet
Series III. Linguistics	1935-1956	2 linear feet
Series IV. Card Files and Notebooks	1911-1951	3 linear feet
Series V. Class notes	1904-1910	0.5 linear feet
Series VI. Photographs	1913-1951	1 linear foot
Series VII. Audio recordings	1948-1958	12 tapes

Administrative information

Restrictions

None.

Provenance

Gift of John Alden Mason, 1967; the Mason estate, 1968; and Anthony Wallace, 1972 (accession numbers 1967-2584ms, 1968-1463ms, 1972-1311ms).

Preferred citation

Cite as: John Alden Mason Papers, American Philosophical Society.

Additional information

Separated material

Transferred to the Printed Materials Department: Bascom, Burton William, Jr., Proto-Tepiman (Tepehuan-Piman), (Diss., University of Washington, 1965).

Sound recordings have been transferred for storage with the Audiovisual collections.

Related material

Mason appears as a correspondent in the papers of Franz Boas, A. Irving Hallowell, Elsie Clews Parsons, and Charles B. Davenport. The correspondence in the Boas Papers is particularly extensive (20 folders) and revealing of his work prior to 1920. In that year, he and Boas had a falling out over political matters, and between 1920 an 1927, they apparently did not exchange correspondence. Mason's later correspondence with Boas provides interesting details on the problems faced by the University Museum during the Depression.

The Benjamin Lee Whorf Papers at Yale contain some correspondence with Mason.

References

The following works by and about Mason appear in the APS Library collections:

Kidder, Alfred, and Linton Satterthwaite, "John Alden Mason," Expedition 10 (1968), 2-3. Call no.: 507.73 P38bu

Satterthwaite, Linton, "John Alden Mason, 1885-1967" American Anthropologist 71 (1969), 871-879 Call. no.: 572.05 Am3

Mason, John Alden, The Ethnology of the Salinan Indians (Berkeley, 1912). Call no.: 378.794 C12pam.

Mason, John Alden, The Mutsun Dialect of Costanoan Based on the Vocabulary of De la Cuesta (Berkeley, 1916). Call no.: 378.794 C12pam.

Mason, John Alden, The Language of the Salinan Indians (Berkeley, 1918). Call no.: 378.794 C12pam.

Mason, John Alden, Archaeology of Santa Marta, Colombia: The Tairona Culture... Marshall Field archaeological expedition to Columbia, 1922-23 (Chicago, 1931). Call no.: 572.07 F45.

Mason, John Alden, "The Tepehuan and the other aborigines of the Mexican Sierra Madre Occidental" America Indigena 8 (1948) Call no.: 572.98 M38x.

Mason, John Alden, The Language of the Papago of Arizona (Philadelphia, 1950). Call no.: 507.73 P38mm [no.2].

Mason, John Alden, The Languages of South American Indians (Washington, 1950). Call no.: 572.061 Sm6b.

Notes

10378.744 H26ola (on shelf)

Ixca texts: taken in Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia 1924(?) (these are inserted in:Harvard University Directory 1910)

(in stacks)

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