coffers to the study of potsherds and other artifacts in relation to the cultural history. Pioneering archaeologists in other regions of the United States completed the transformation of professional methodology initiated by Kidder. His Introduction to the Study of Southwestern Archaeology, published in 1924, was the first synthesis of North American prehistory based on professionally recovered empirical data. In spite of his efforts at documentation, Kidder's conclusions have sometimes been criticized for a lack of integration between his field reports and his later synthesis and interpretation of that data. However, Kidder clearly emphasized archaeology's need for a scientific "eye" in the development of fact collecting techniques and clear definitions. In the late 1920s, Kidder started the Pecos Conferences for archaeologists and ethnologists working in the American southwest. In 1927, a temporal system of nomenclature, known as the Pecos Classification System, was established for use in southwestern sites. Archaeologists have since used the sequence, with later variations, to assign approximate dates to dozens of sites throughout the Southwest and to determine cultural ties and differences among them. The same year he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1936, Kidder formally used the Navajo term "Anasazi" to define a specific cultural group of people living in the southwest between approximately 200 BC and 1300 AD. This term had been casually used by excavators for many of the "ancient people" since the early explorations of Richard Wetherill, and had been informally used in the work of the Pecos Conferences. As an associate in charge of archaeological investigations (1927–1929) and as chairman of the division of historical research (1929–1950) at the Carnegie Institution, Kidder conducted a broad-scale multidisciplinary research program in Kaminaljuyu in the Guatemalan highlands which established the framework of Maya stratigraphy. In 1939 he became honorary curator of Southwestern American archaeology at the Peabody Museum, Harvard. In 1951, Kidder, in discussions with Thomas Stuart Ferguson and Gordon Willey of Harvard University, was instrumental in establishing a foundation dealing with the status of archaeology in Mexico and Central America. In regard to those discussions, Ferguson wrote that the three scholars agreed “...it was unfortunate that so little work was being carried on in so important an area and that something should be done to increase explorations and excavations....Despite the amazing discoveries made between 1930 and 1950, work on the Pre-Classic was virtually at a standstill in