Obituary of Ele “Tony” Baker 1944-2012
Jason M. LaBelle
Center for
Mountain and Plains Archaeology
Colorado State University
Paleoindian
archaeology lost one of its mavericks with the passing of Tony Baker on May 30,
2012. Tony will be remembered for harnessing the powerful new medium of the
Internet to share his archaeological interests with readers around the world, no
matter their academic pedigree or background.
Born Ele Antoine Baker on
October 20, 1944, Tony was raised in Albuquerque, where he attended the
University of New Mexico and earned a BS in Civil Engineering in 1967. This led
to a long career with Texaco, where he worked as a petroleum engineer in west
Texas, Wyoming, and Colorado. He married his beloved wife Simone on February
17, 1969, and raised two children, William Anderson (Andy) Baker and Traci
Michelle (Missy) Jervis.
Tony had a lifelong interest in prehistory,
inspired by his family’s role in Great Plains and Southwestern archaeology. His
grandfather, William E. Baker, was the county agricultural agent in Cimarron
County, Oklahoma and was well known for amassing an impressive collection of
Paleoindian (and later) artifacts that emerged from the Dust Bowl blowouts.
Tony’s mother and father, Jewel and Ele Baker, tried to make archaeology their
livelihood, working on WPA archaeological projects in the Texas Panhandle and
throughout central New Mexico. Yet making archaeology a profession was tough in
the 1930s, and the Baker family ended up on another path. Beginning in the
1960s, Tony and his father renewed the family interest and began surface
collecting artifacts from around the Albuquerque area. Over time they acquired
a large and well documented collection. This landscape-scale inventory has
provided fodder for many other Paleoindian investigations, by researchers such
as Jim Judge, Dennis Stanford, Phil LeTourneau, Dan Amick, and the author, among
others.
Tony furthered his archaeological journey by taking graduate
classes in the late 1980s, and earning an MA degree in Anthropology from the
University of Colorado-Denver in 1990. His thesis focused on projectile point
resharpening (Baker 1990), using artifacts from his family collection. Tony’s
unique contribution to the world of archaeology began in 1996, when he launched
his website “Paleoindian & Other Archaeological Stuff.” This was Tony’s
forum for sharing his archaeological views with anyone who happened to stumble
upon the site. I remember being in awe while visiting Tony’s home in the late
1990s and seeing his notebooks full of printed correspondence from interested
readers across the world – obviously his work was being noticed!
The
website evolved over time, with Tony adding several pages per year. Topics
ranged from his views on Paleoindian technology, especially Clovis and Folsom,
to his ideas of Pre-Clovis archaeology, Acheulean handaxes, and Archaic
traditions in New Mexico. Well informed, but not pretentious, his webpages had
broad appeal. He was most proud of his work modeling the fracture mechanics of
lithic flakes, using engineering software. Inspired by the work of Andrew
Pelcin, Tony attempted to model fracture initiation and propagation, controlling
for platform, core, and anvil shapes. These computer models were then compared
to archaeological examples as well as experimental flakes, knapped by his friend
and colleague Bob Patten. This work was typified by such web pages as “Digital
Crabtree: Computer Simulation of Folsom Fluting” (Baker 2000b).
After his
retirement from Texaco in 1999, Tony was able to devote more time to his
website, fieldwork, and conferences. The last 15 years saw Tony in regular
attendance at the annual meetings of the Society for American Archaeology and
the Plains Anthropological Society. He was a contributor to the two Folsom
workshops held in Texas in the late 1990s, documenting them through his
webpages. Fieldwork took him to Alaska, where he spent many summers
volunteering for the BLM on the North Slope, working with his friend Mike Kunz
(Rinella 2007). One of my fondest memories of Tony is when we were able to work
together at the Nall site, a Paleoindian camp discovered by his grandfather in
the 1930s.
Tony will be dearly missed. He was not afraid to speak his
mind and he told it as he saw it. Sometimes blunt, sometimes not, Tony was
always looking for new friends to talk rocks. Baker’s contributions will
probably never be fully appreciated by many in the professional archaeological
community, in an era where contribution is measured mostly by the volume of
articles and monographs produced. But Tony’s website will be remembered as one
of the earliest archaeological crossroads, created at the beginning of the
widespread use of the Internet. His ability to reach an interested audience,
whether professional or avocational, should be admired and emulated in the years
to come. The hundreds of thousands of website visits surely attest to
that.
Tony’s family will continue to maintain his website, so that his
work and memory live on.
Printed Publications
Baker, Ele A.
(Tony)
1990 Expediency and Projectile Resharpening. Unpublished Master’s
Thesis, Department of Anthropology, University of Colorado, Denver.
2000
Family Memoirs. In Archaeological Excavations of Antelope Creek Ruins and
Alibates Ruins, Panhandle Aspect, 1938-1941, by Ele M. Baker and Jewel A. Baker,
pp. ix-xii. Publication Number 8, Panhandle Archaeological Society, Amarillo,
Texas.
2002 Digital Crabtree: Computer Simulation of Folsom Fluting. In
Folsom Technology and Lifeways, edited by John E. Clark and Michael B. Collins,
pp. 209-226. Special Publication Number 4, Lithic Technology, Department of
Anthropology, University of Tulsa.
2007 A Simple Request. Prehistoric
American XLI:20-21
2007 The Paleo End Scraper (edited by Gene Hynek).
Prehistoric American XLI:60.
LeTourneau, Philippe D. and Tony Baker
2002 The Role of Obsidian in Folsom Lithic Technology. In Folsom
Technology and Lifeways, edited by John E. Clark and Michael B. Collins, pp.
31-45. Special Publication Number 4, Lithic Technology, Department of
Anthropology, University of Tulsa.
LeTourneau, Philippe D., R. Kunselman,
and Tony Baker
1999 Results of Additional XRF Analysis of New Mexico
Folsom Obsidian Artifacts. Current Research in the Pleistocene
16:99-101.
Rinella, Steven
2007 Meet the Flintstones. Outside
Magazine, August 2007 (an account of a North Slope archaeological survey with
Tony Baker and Michael Kunz).
Paleoindian & Other Archaeological
Stuff website (www.ele.net)
Baker, Ele A. (Tony)
1996a Images from
the Asian Steppe.
1996b Projectile Refurbishing.
1997a Art and The
Folsom Point.
1997b The Belen Point: Plainview Variant?
1997c The Clovis
First/Pre-Clovis Problem.
1997d The Folsom Workshop: A Conference on
Prehistoric Replicative Folsom Knapping.
1997e The Paleo End
Scraper.
1998a Application of Finite Element Analysis to the Understanding
of Flake Formation (Tony Baker and Andrew Pelcin).
1998b Folsom Point
Manufacture.
1999 The 2nd Folsom Workshop (1999): A Conference on
Prehistoric Replicative Folsom Knapping.
2000a The Clovis/Folsom
Transition.
2000b Digital Crabtree: Computer Simulation of Folsom Fluting.
2000c The New Mexico Archaic / The Oshara Tradition.
2001a My Parents,
The Archaeologists.
2001b Transporting and Caching Lithic Material in Biface
Form.
2001c Understanding Flake Mechanics:An Unifying Theory.
2002
Variation in Paleoindian Lithic Assemblages Through Time.
2003a Contrasting
the Lithic Technologies of Mesa and Folsom (Tony Baker and Michael
Kunz)
2003b Static and Dynamic Loading Modes.
2003c A Theory for Flake
Creation.
2004a The Clovis First/ Pre-Clovis Problem: Revisited
2004.
2004b The Lithic Containers of the Archaeological Record .
2005a
Bruce Bradley Has Gone Academic.
2005b The Elephant in the Parlor: Another
Story about Sandia Cave Based on an Interview of an Individual Who Excavated in
the Cave.
2006a The Acheulean Handaxe.
2006b The Flake: Stepchild of
Lithic Analysis.
2006c North Slope Slide Show.
2007a The Acheulean
Handaxe at Boxgrove.
2007b Pleistocene Bones and Stones in the New
World.
2007c Recycling.
2007d Tony's Quick and Dirty Opinions.
2008a
Dear Arrowhead Hunter.
2008b Lithic Artifacts from North of the Arctic
Circle.
2008c Marvin McCormick -- The First Modern Fluter.
2008d A
Simple Request.
2009a The Antler Foreshaft -- The Original Shrink Wrapped
Package.
2009b I Forgot to Remember to Forget: 1st Peoples in the New
World
2010 The Invisible Signature of the Folsom Point Knapper.
2011a
Definition of Flake Types.
2011b From Mesa To Monte Verde (Michael Kunz and
Tony Baker)
2011c Lithic-Rich and Lithic-Poor Environments.
2011d The
Santa Claus Paradigm.
_________________________________
Dr.
Jason M. LaBelle
Associate Professor, Center for Mountain and Plains
Archaeology
Department of Anthropology, Colorado State University
Ft.
Collins, Colorado
