Bertha Pallan Thurston Cody (née Parker; August 30, 1907 – October 8, 1978) was an American archaeologist, working as an assistant in archaeology at the Southwest Museum.

[citation needed] Her parents divorced in 1914, and the Tahamonts (Elijah, Margaret, and Beulah) relocated to Los Angeles, with Bertha in tow, to work in Hollywood films.

[22] Bertha worked at Gypsum Cave in 1930,[20][23] a site that Harrington promoted as having the earliest evidence for human occupation of North America during the Pleistocene.

[24] As the expedition secretary, Bertha worked at cleaning, repairing, and cataloguing finds;[25] in addition, she explored the rooms of the cave in her spare time and was able to reach into some of the most inaccessible crevices.

On one of these occasions she discovered the skull of a species of extinct giant ground sloth, Nothrotherium shastense Sinclair, alongside ancient human tools, in Room 3.

Bertha Parker Pallan Thurston Cody is notable in the field of archaeology for her role as a ground-breaker: she was one of the first (if not the first) Native American female archaeologists.

[29][2] She was certainly first in her ability to conduct this work at a high level of skill, yet without a university education, making discoveries and gaining insights that impressed the trained archaeologists around her.