Archaeology Pioneer. Born on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, the eldest of five children born to Madeleine Appleton and Alfred Vincent Kidder, Senior. He attended Phillips Academy in Andover and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1933, earning a BA. He was employed by Phillips Academy, which led to fieldwork at Pecos Pueblo, New Mexico, where he established a new stratigraphic chronology. He then organized a council that established a "unified system of nomenclature" for the different periods of ancient Puebloan culture. At this first Pecos Conference, the participants agreed upon the "Pecos Classification," terms for chronological periods that are distinguishable in the archaeological record. These classifications remain commonly used today: Basket Maker I, II, and III, and Pueblo I, II, III, IV, and V. The Pecos Conference is still an annual event in the present day. He continued with graduate work, obtaining a doctorate in 1937, one of the first archaeologists to earn a Ph.D in the field in the US. He went to Peru for the first time that year in preparation for a course on Andean archaeology he was to teach. Returning with potsherds for study, he pioneered thin-section analysis for Andean pottery. He proceeded with excavations at Pucara in 1939, sponsored by the Peabody Museum. From June to September 1941, he conducted a survey to discover the extent of the Pucara culture; the survey still stands as a valuable contribution to the field. In 1939, he was appointed Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Andean Research. In 1941, he became part of the Inter-American Affairs archaeological program, which came about with the US government's concern about improving cultural relations with Latin America, as Germany was believed to have as great an influence there as the US. Kidder became Director of Project 7 in the southern highlands of Peru. Between 1942 and 1946, he served in the United States Army Air Corps. In 1950, he began at the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, where he served as Associate Director and Curator of the American Section. In 1955, he excavated four sites in the Lake Titicaca Basin, where he pioneered using C14 dates for the Andean highlands. That year, he also served as president of the Institute of Andean Research. The American Anthropological Association honored him with the establishment of the A.V. Kidder Award for outstanding work in the field of American anthropology. He has been considered the foremost among US southwestern and Mesoamerica archaeologists during the first half of the 20th century.