Mark Raymond Harrington was an American archaeologist who played a significant role in uncovering what became known as the “Lost City” in southern Nevada. The site, appropriately named Pueblo Grande de Nevada, comprises a series of ancient Native American settlements located along the Muddy River in the Moapa Valley. These sites were occupied from roughly 300 B.C. to around A.D. 1150.
In 1924, two brothers, John and Fay Perkins, discovered ruins and reported them to Nevada’s governor, James Scrugham. The governor contacted Harrington, who was associated with the Museum of the American Indian in New York. Harrington led the first major excavations, which began that same year.
The remains included pit houses and later adobe pueblos—some of which were over 100 rooms in size—built by the ancestral Puebloan people. The press began referring to the site as the “Lost City,” although Harrington preferred the formal name.
In the 1930s, the construction of Hoover Dam posed a threat to the area as the rising waters of Lake Mead would soon flood many of the sites. Harrington, with support from the National Park Service and the Civilian Conservation Corps, organized salvage excavations to recover as much material as possible before the site was inundated.
In 1935, the Lost City Museum (then known as the Boulder Dam Park Museum) was constructed near Overton, Nevada, to preserve and display artifacts from the site. The museum still operates today.
Harrington’s work was among the first to demonstrate the western extent of the Puebloan cultural world and remains a foundational chapter in the archaeology of the Mojave and Southwest deserts.