John Alden Mason (January 14, 1885 – November 7, 1967) was an American archaeological anthropologist and linguist.

Mason was born in Orland, Indiana, but grew up in Philadelphia's Germantown.

His dissertation was an ethnographic study of the Salinan Amerindian ethnic group of California.

[2] In 1922, Captain Marshall Field provided funds for an archaeological survey of Colombia.

The Field Museum of Natural History houses a collection of correspondence, largely in the form of letters between Mason and the Curator of Anthropology, Berthold Laufer.