Wendell Clark Bennett was born in Marion, Indiana on August 17, 1905. He became an anthropologist after he graduated from University of Chicago in 1927 and received his M.A. there in 1929, followed by his Ph.D. in 1930. During that time, he also spent time on the Hawaiian Islands for the Bishop Museum on its research staff. He worked on the archeology of Kaua. He wrote one of the few reports ever written on Polynesian prehistory. In 1930-1931, he travelled with Robert Zingg to the Tarahumara of northern Mexico. The University of Chicago published their monograph, which was one of the first modern studies on remote Mexican Indians and one of the very few published on northern Mexico.
Bender continued to collect ethnographic data whenever he had the opportunity, even though his primary interest was archaeology. He was very generous in making his findings available to anyone who was interested. After returning from Mexico, he started an association with the American Museum of Natural History, where he became the Assistant Curator of South American Archaeology, which lasted until 1938.
In 1932, he made his first trip to the Andes for the Museum and it was his most important one. On that trip, he discovered his lasting and absorbing fascination of the area and established an immediate reputation as a Peruvianist. Tiahuanaco was the place he chose for his first excavation because to the key positions of the Tiahuanaco style in the Peruvian coast sequence. At that time, the stratigraphy of the Titacaca Basin had not been explored, though there was a lot of unfounded speculation about the site that was passing as fact. Bennett wanted to find the truth. He established his well known Early, Classic and Decadent pottery sequences there and he was able to relate it to two major building periods and some of the stone sculpture. His work laid the foundation for later studies on the nature of the spread of Tiahuanaco influence over large areas of the Central Andes. This movement was something that interested Bennett until the end of his life. In His posthumously published account of his last field work , in 1950, at Wari, near Ayachcho, Peru, was a very important contribution to that work. Bennett made the first properly controlled excavation in Venezuela.
Bennett extended the knowledge of Tiahuananco in the lowlands and the Titicaca Basin when he returned to Bolivia in 1934. He also discovered a new phase of highland archaeology called Chiripa, which he considered to be post-Classic and pre-Decadent Tiahuanaco. He soon decided that his judgment was based on mistaken stratigraphic interpretation. In 1947, he retracted his earlier opinion and placed Chiripa in a much earlier time.
A year after Wendell Bennett married Hope Ranslow on October 30,1945, they went to the north coast of Peru, which at that time had no paved roads. The later choice of Viru Valley for a concentrated joint campaign, in which Bennett took an active part, was undertaken there in 1946 due to that trip of the Bennett's. Bennett and his wife returned to the highlands of Peru in 1938, at which time he made the first scientific excavations at Chavín de Huanter, and where he gained much information about the little known Recuay culture. He also discovered that there was influence from Tiahuanoco at Wilkawain, in the Callejon de Huaylas.
Bennett's wide experience in Latin America led to many appointments on several committees of the Division of Anthropology and Psychology of the National Research Council. From 1936-1940, he edited the section in the Handbook of Latin American Studies on South American Archaeology. Bennett served as secretary-treasurer and was a charter member of the Institute of Andean Research from it's beginning in 1937 through 1942. Bennett left the American Museum in 1938 to take the position of Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. In 1940 he left there to become an Associate Professor at Yale. In 1945 he became a full professor and in 1949 he was named chairman of the Department of Anthropology. At that same time, he also held positions as a Research Associate of the Peabody Museum and was a Fellow of Pierson College. From 1939-1942, he was the representative of the American Anthropological Association in the Division of Anthropology and Psychology of the National Research Council and Chairman of the Committee on Latin American Anthropology of the same division from 1941-1944. In 1942 Bennett was appointed executive secretary of the joint Committee on Latin American Studies when the National Research Council, the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies consolidated. From 1942-1945, during the war years, he was occupied by that position and he was also a member of the Ethnogeographic Board.
Bennett made a brief trip to the region of Cuenca in Ecuador in 1944, but it was 1946 before he did any more field work. He took part in the Viru Valley Expedition, doing extensive excavations at the Gallinazo site he had first reported on in 1936. During that time he was very busy working on many other projects. He prepared a large part of Volume II of the Handbook of South American Indians and worked on the writing of Andean Culture History, with Junius Bird, for the American Museum of Natural History. Those two publications are the most concise and useful summaries available on Andean archaeology. Bennett became a member of the Board of Directors of the Social Science Research Council in 1945. He was chairman of the Area Studies Executive Committee and served as consultant to the Human Relations Area Files at Yale. In 1952 he became president of the American Anthropological Association.
Wendell Bennett was swimming off the South Beach of Martha's Vineyard on September 6, 1953, when he suffered a heart attack and died. He was said to have been " a leader who was at once an active and very productive field worker, a fine and beloved teacher, and a worker for anthropology of extraordinary administrative ability. Bennett combined these talents effectively for the advancement of knowledge, the development of students and for the benefit of our science in its relations with government and the research councils. He contributed more to Andean archaeology than any man of his generation. He believed in broad approaches- areal, cross-cultural and interdisciplinary." Wendell Bennett had a profound knowledge of Spanish. Few foreigners understood Latin America as he did.
A few of the publications by Wendell Clark Bennett:
Archaeology of Kauai (1931)
Hawaiian Heiaus (1932)
Area Studies in American Universities (1951)
Wendall Clark Bennett, 1905-1953. By Alfred Kidder II and Eugene Davidson. American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 56, No. 2, Part 1 (Apr., 1954) pp.269-273.
The Biography Channel, http://search.biography.com/print_record.pl?id=12728
(December, 1999)
Bennett,
Wendell Clark. Andean Culture History, Natural History Press, Garden City, N.Y., 1964
Written By: Tracy Binek, 1999
Edited By: Lillian Dolentz, 2008