Mark Raymond Harrington (July 6, 1882 – June 30, 1971) was curator of archaeology at the Southwest Museum from 1928 to 1964 and discoverer of ancient Pueblo structures near Overton, Nevada, and Little Lake, California.
The son of Rose Martha Smith Harrington and Mark Walrod Harrington, a professor of astronomy at the University of Michigan who also held appointments in botany, zoology, and geology,[2] he spent his childhood roaming the area around Ann Arbor, Michigan, his hometown, learning tribal languages from Indian friends and, when his family moved to Mount Vernon, New York, excavating and collecting local artifacts, thus feeding an early and lifelong interest in Native American culture.
[3] When his father's poor health and mental illness forced him to drop out of school, Harrington took some of his finds to Frederic Ward Putnam, then the curator in anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
[4] Putnam hired Harrington as an apprentice field archaeologist, a post that eventually allowed him to attend Columbia University, where he studied under the celebrated anthropologist Franz Boas.
In 1912, Harrington met Mabel Dodge Luhan and introduced her and a group of friends to peyote during an impromptu "ceremony" at her apartment in Greenwich Village.
Harrington spent the next 13 years working for Heye as an archaeologist, ethnologist, field collector, and curator in Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri, Oklahoma, Nevada, Texas, Cuba, and Ecuador.
In December of that year, Harrington married Edna L. Parker, a descendant of the famous Seneca religious leader of the Iroquois, Handsome Lake.
Harrington also built an addition to the north wing of the house, put a fireplace in the living room, rebuilt patio walls and added a garage.
At the time he undertook the Pico Adobe project, Harrington and a colleague also began to dig in Gypsum Cave in the Frenchman Range in Nevada, where they found Basketmaker artifacts.
The archaeologist and ethnologist Bertha Parker (Abenaki, Seneca), who was also Harrington's niece, served as expedition secretary and discovered the skull of an extinct ground sloth.
Harrington found a spear point in an apparent fire pit alongside the bones of several ancient animals, which led him to assert in a published article that they were contemporaries and that the site was between 10,000 and 25,000 years old.