NARN/JONA materials concerning Alexander Chase:

• Alexander W. Chase and the Nineteenth-Century Archaeology and Ethnography of the Southern Oregon and Northern California Coast [Vol. 25(2)]
  • R. Lee Lyman

Alexander Chase

Courtesy of Northwest Anthropological Research Notes

Alexander W. Chase (1843–1888) was the first person to perform archaeological research on the northern California and southern Oregon coast, and to publish his findings. Between 1863 and 1878, while employed by the U. S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, Chase visited the southern Oregon coast. The results of some of his work, performed in the early 1860s, were published in 1869 and 1873, but a major unpublished manuscript completed in 1873 and his correspondence with John W. Powell and Spencer F. Baird in the early 1880s provide insight to the depth and breadth of Chase as a scholar and as a man. Chase was "apparently a surveyor by training, and an anthropologist (among other things) by avocation."