Obituary of Ele “Tony” Baker 1944–2012

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 web pages 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 web pages. 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.