97 Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology | Vol. 37, No. 1 (2017) | pp. 97–104 PIONEERS Pioneers is devoted to personal refections by students and colleagues on major fgures in the study of the indigenous cultures of the region. These are not obituaries or memorials, but candid recollections that convey insight into the personalities of the pioneers, as well as the cultural context of anthropology during their lives. If you have suggestions for a pioneer, and names and contact information for those who may wish to prepare a recollection, please contact Steven Simms. MEMORIES OF EMMA LOU DAVIS (1905 –1988) Steven R. Simms Utah State University Emma Lou Davis was a polymath who brought an impressive array of accomplishments when she turned her attention to archaeology in mid-life. I did not know “Davey” (as her friends called her), but I have been regaled with stories of flamboyance that verge on the scandalous. I do know from Dr. Davis’s work that she was an open thinker, and I suspect it was the breadth and richness of her life that brought something out of the ordinary to the archaeology of the Desert West. Davis was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on Novem- ber 26, 1905. She earned a Bachelor in Fine Arts degree from Vassar College in 1927, and for the next two decades pursued a career as an artist and designer. Soon after college she traveled to the Soviet Union and China, adventures in her early twenties that signaled an activism and an interest in socialist causes that persisted throughout her life. She returned to work at the Whitney Art Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Her bas relief sculpture, completed in 1938, adorns the Social Security building in Washington, D.C. During World War II she employed her talents as a designer, working at the Douglas Aircraft Company. She continued in the post-war years as a furniture designer in California, and as an art instructor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. A move to New Mexico provided the context that awakened an interest in archaeology. She took courses at the University of New Mexico, and then enrolled in graduate school at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her Masters degree focused on the ethnography of the Kutzadika’a Paiute band of Mono Lake, California, which launched her into the world of Great Basin Native Americans. Her doctoral dissertation explored Mesa Verde migrations, suggesting that the connection she made with archaeology in New Mexico remained strong. She received her doctorate from UCLA in 1964 at the age of 58. Even as she worked on her doctorate on Mesa Verde, the Great Basin was on her mind, as evidenced by her 1963 paper in American Antiquity , “The Desert Culture of the Western Great Basin: A Lifeway of Seasonal Transhumance.” She understood the Desert Culture as a conceptual abstraction, and employed the ethnographic analogy of the Mono Lake Paiute to draw a contrast with the discoveries of Folsom and Clovis points in Nevada and eastern California (Davis 1963). Students of the Paleoindian period of the Desert West remember Davis for her pioneering work in Pleistocene archaeology, her efforts to press the temporal boundaries for the antiquity of a human presence in the region, and for her ability to see beyond the artifacts to regional scales of interpretation. She advocated and practiced archaeology as an interdisciplinary science. She threw her net broadly across her interests and her associations, forging a relationship with the Mojave avocational desert rats so important to really knowing the land (Campbell 2014). Davis hit her stride with a steady stream of publi- cations over the next two decades, resulting in over 70 monographs, papers, and reports. Some notable examples include a review of work on Mojave geoglyphs