Byron Cummings (September 20, 1860 – May 21, 1954) is known as the dean of Southwestern archaeology. Cummings served as the University of Arizona’s 9th president (1927–28), Arizona State Museum’s first director (1915–38), founding head of UofA's Department of Archaeology (1915–37), and the founder of the Arizona Archaeological and Historical Society (est. 1916). Cummings was by all accounts a remarkable man. Remembered as the Dean of Southwestern Archaeology, he was an energetic teacher and brilliant scholar. He was also an American football coach and professor at the University of Utah. He served as the head football coach at the University of Utah 1897 where he was also a professor from 1893 to 1915. He later served as a professor at the University of Arizona. Exploration he and his students conducted in SE Utah and NE Arizona, then almost unknown to Americans, resulted in the discoveries of the Natural Bridges that President Roosevalt declared as Natural Bridges National Monument in 1908. Cummings continued hie explorations into Arizona, where he discovered Betatakin, Inscription House, and other famed cliff dwellings south and east of Navaho Mountain. On August 14, 1909, he led his party to the discovery of Rainbow Natural Bridge. From the University of Arizona continued his archeological researches each summer until he retired from the classroom and the Arizona State Museum in 1938, with the title of Director Emeritus. His last field work was at Kinishba, a great ruin on the Apache reservation, excavation of which he pursued annually from 1931 through 1939 with student assistants majoring in anthropology. He restored part of the ruin and built a local museum with the help of Apache labor, and he cared for it until 1946 when he retired asecond time in order to devote full time to his writings. Even at 70 few student helpers could wield a shovel as long and as efficiently as he, and none could equal him on a cross-country hike. Southwestern archaeology Professor Cummings did pioneering archaeological fieldwork in the early 1900s in southern Utah's San Juan country. Archaeologist Neil Judd, then Cummings' student, assisted in this work, as did other of Cummings' field students. Cummings was the first to discover Pleistocene man in southern Arizona and his discoveries led to the eventual recognition of the Cochise culture that has been dated to before 6,000 B.C. He authored numerous articles, pamphlets and books about Southwestern cultures based on