Nels Christian Nelson (also referred to as N.C. Nelson) was born on April 9, 1875 near Frederica, Jutland, Denmark. Born into a hardworking Danish farming family, he was given minimal opportunity and time for schooling. In 1892 at the age of 17, he emigrated to the United States and lived with his aunt and uncle in Minnesota. It was at this point that his schooling began. He spoke no English and even though he was 17, he entered school at the first grade level. However, due to his determination to do something other than the farming lifestyle of which he had grown tired, he graduated from high school in 1901 at the age of 26.
After that, Nelson moved to California where he worked unskilled laborer jobs until he saved enough money to enroll in Stanford University as a Philosophy major. He soon realized this field of study left him unfilled. In 1906, a fellow student invited Nelson on an archeological excavation of a prehistoric cemetery near the San Francisco Bay area. It was at this point, he switched his major to Anthropology, receiving his Bachelors Degree from Stanford in 1907 and his Masters Degree in 1908, writing his thesis on the shell mounds in the San Francisco Bay area. His research and work in archeology has included Denmark, Spain, various regions of Asia, Kentucky, Missouri, Florida and the Southwestern United States. It was in the southwestern U.S. where he pioneered and implemented the stratigraphic excavation techniques.
He spent many years of fieldwork in the Tano District of New Mexico where he extensively practiced stratigraphic excavation techniques. This is shown in one of his many publications, Chronology of the Tano Ruins, New Mexico, wherein his gives extensive detail regarding his archeology work on the stratigraphic relationship of different types of pottery coming up with five types; each type succeeding the previous but yet each type accompanying and flowing through to the next one. His professional career involved being a field assistant for the U.S. Geological Survey, Assistant Curator for the Anthropological Museum of the University of California and an Instructor of Anthropology. He worked for the American Museum of Natural History in New York, was Associate Curator of North American Archeology, Associate Curator of Archeology and Curator of Prehistoric Archeology.
Nels Christian Nelson is well-known and admired for extensive field work in stratigraphic archeology from which he has produced a very large number of publications which have been published in the American Museum Journal, the American Anthropologist, Natural History, American Antiquity, Smithsonian Report for 1935, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, just to name a few.
He was both Vice President and President of the American Anthropological Society, President of the Society for American Anthropology, President of the American Ethnological Society and Vice President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Nels Christian Nelson died in 1964. Because of his determination and dedication, his life went from that of a uneducated poor farm boy to that of a well-known and well-respected archeologist who pioneered stratigraphic excavation principles and promoted the hypothesis of age-and area, the outward diffusion of human culture.
www.utexac.edu/depts/grg/gstudent/grg3941/spring98/nels/nelspub.html
www.utexac.edu/depts/grg/gstudent/grg3941/spring98/nels/nelsbio.html
www.utexac.edu/depts/grg/gstudent/grg3941/spring98/nels/nelsmain.html
1916 "Chronology of the Tano Ruins, New Mexico," American Anthropologist, vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 159-180, Lancaster
Written by Nancy L. Solberg
Edited by Marcy L. Voelker, 2007