HIBBEN, Frank Cummings 1910-2002

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born December 5, 1910, in Lakewood, OH; died June 11, 2002, in Albuquerque, NM. Anthropologist, archaeologist, educator, and author. Hibben attended the University of New Mexico to study mountain lions and pursue a master's degree in zoology. After earning a doctorate in archaeology at Harvard University, he returned to New Mexico, where he spent his entire career. It was Hibben who conducted excavations of the Sandia Man Cave near Albuquerque in the late 1930s and discovered that human beings had lived there as long as 12,000 years before. His major contribution to anthropology was Sandia Man, one of the earliest-known human groups in North America. Hibben taught at the University of New Mexico for many years and served as the founding director of what is now the Maxwell Museum of Archaeology. He also established the Hibben Trust to help finance graduate students in archaeology and donated a substantial amount of money to build the Hibben Center, an annex to the museum. Hibben's books include The Lost Americans, Treasure in the Dust, and Digging up America. Outside the academy, Hibben was known as a hunter. As the chair of the New Mexico State Game and Fish Commission in the 1960s, he worked to introduce new species of wild game animals into the state. He also hunted for big game throughout the United States and elsewhere, including Africa, where he had conducted archaeological field research after World War II. Hibben's books on hunting include Indian Hunts and Indian Hunters of the Old West and Under the African Sun: Forty-eight Years of Hunting the African Continent.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Albuquerque Tribune, June 14, 2002, obituary by Frank Zoretich, p. A1.

Washington Post, June 21, 2002, p. 37.