Cosmos Mindeleff

Cosmos Mindeleff (1863–1938) was an American archaeologist and journalist from a Russian-American family. In 1881, on John Wesley Powell's appointment, he joined the Bureau of American Ethnology and, with his brother Victor, investigated Pueblo architecture in Arizona and New Mexico. In 1891 he directed the stabilization of the Casa Grande ruin and surveyed more than fifty sites in the Verde Valley. His works focus on the architecture and cliff dwellings of the American Southwest, including Navaho Houses, The Cliff Ruins of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona, Casa Grande Ruin and its 1891 repair record, and Aboriginal Remains in Verde Valley, Arizona. These studies are distinguished by field survey and detailed recording of building forms, providing foundational material for research on prehistoric and historic settlements in the Southwest. He later became a reporter for the New York World and other papers, and died in Carmel, New York, in 1938.