Elizabeth Warder Campbell (née Crozer; August 11, 1893 – December 21, 1971) was an American archeologist, notable for proposing a much earlier date for the presence of humans in the desert Southwest than was generally accepted.
Until World War II the education of most daughters of Philadelphia high society who attended Miss Irwin's ended at the secondary level.
[1] His lung damage, due to exposure to mustard gas, caused them to move to Los Angeles, California, and later to the drier climes of Twentynine Palms where they established a homestead.
[7][8] The Campbells maintained their residence in Twentynine Palms, and lived in a summer home on the shores of Lake Tahoe, near Glenbrook, Nevada, where Bill died in June 1944.
After his death, Campbell sold the house in Twentynine Palms and moved to Carson City, Nevada, where she met and married Joe Cecil Turman.
[citation needed] While living in Tucson she became a research associate with the Arizona State Museum[1] and continued to work on the collections she and Bill had assembled over the years.
[4] They would drive their trusty automobile -- "The Ship of the Desert"[10]—into the surrounding countryside looking for archaeological sites and visiting locations that McHaney told them about.
[1] The Campbells argued that this wet period was not recent and presented as evidence the ground-water level being 97 feet below the surface of the surrounding arid mountain ranges.
Starting with the Pinto Basin report, and for all research after, Campbell collaborated and consulted with well-known professionals in the fields of geology, paleontology, and archaeology.
In 1936, Campbell published her seminal paper "Archaeological Problems in the Southern California Deserts"[18] in which she outlined her hypothesis that associated prehistoric peoples with certain landforms.
For this reason we have sought man's ancient remains along extinct river channels and about the strand lines of playas and fossil lakes, indicated as such by beaches, terraces, spits, and wave-cut cliffs -- mute testimony to a past day of moister climate.
We have not be disappointed in our search for locations by geological indication, for during the last two years the Desert Laboratory of the Southwest Museum has found and studied ten sites of the desired type.
As all of these are now far from water, their occupants no doubt belonged to a period of greater rainfall.Noted archaeologists of the day disagreed with Campbell's interpretation[20][21][22] and this rejection of her hypothesis continued into the 1950s.