Andean Past

Volume 5 Article 4

1998

Heidy Fogel, 1956-1994Richard L. BurgerYale, richard.burger@yale.edu

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Recommended CitationBurger, Richard L. (1998) "Heidy Fogel, 1956-1994," Andean Past: Vol. 5 , Article 4.Available at: https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/andean_past/vol5/iss1/4

HEIDY FOGEL, 1956-1994

When Heidy Fogel died on November 11,1994 at the age of only 38, Andean ar-chaeology lost its leading authority on theGallinazo culture. I first met Heidy in 1983when she came to New Haven to inquire aboutYale's M.A. Program in ArchaeologicalStudies. Fresh from her work as staff artist andcrew member of the Proyecto Chimu Sur inCasma, she was full of excitement andenthusiasm about Peruvian archaeology bothas a quest for scientific knowledge and as asocial field teeming with wonderfullyeccentric personalities. During her shortinterview, she filled my office with energy andanecdotes, and her departure left a strangecalm, like the one that descends over adevastated landscape following a cyclone.

Heidy never lost her astonishing vitality,her love of the field, or her engagement withthe people who constitute it. Even the twohead-on autoniobile collisions that she sus-

ANDEAN PAST 5 (1998):1-3.

Richard L. BurgerYale University

tained while a graduate student barely seemed'to slow her down. Heidy had an intense pas-sion for life, which she expressed through herart, dancing, knitting, and unique style ofdress. I always thought of Heidy as a force ofriature--unpredictable and unstoppable.

Heidy was born in Boston, but spent mostof her childhood and teenage years insuburban Newton, Massachusetts. Althoughshe rarely spoke of it, her parents were Holo-caust survivors, her mother having been in-terned in Auschwitz and her father havingspent the war in a series of Nazi death camps.Throughout her life, she remained unusuallyclose to her parents at).d two brothers, andcontinued to maintain tight friendships withher high school classmates. Heidy had naturalartistic talent and she honed her skills as ascientific illustrator at the Rhode IslandSchool of Design, from which she received aB.F.A. in 1978. For much of her adult life shethought of herself as an artist, rather than ascholar, and her drafting skills served her wellin her own research, as well as being animportant source of support during her grad-uate studies.

Shortly after graduating from RISD, Heidybegan to pursue her long-standing interest inarchaeology by working as an archaeologicalillustrator and exhibits assistant at theGrosvenor Museum in Chester, England andthen as a crew chief for an archaeologicalsurvey in Israel, sponsored by the Rockefellerand Israel Museums. While supporting herselfas a technical artist in Boston, Heidycontinued her involvement in archaeology,drawing upon the resources of a neighboringinstitution of higher learning, Harvard Univer-sity. In the summer of 1979 she joinedHarvard's Mount Jasper Project and helpedsupervise the survey and mapping of a quarrysite in northern New Hampshire; the followingyear she went to work as an archaeologicalillustrator at the Harvard Peabody Museum'sInstitute for Conservation Archaeology.

ANDEAN PAST 5 (1998)

As a Harvard employee, she began takingclasses in 1981 as a Special Graduate Student,including a course on Peruvian archaeologythat had a great impact on her. Taught byGordon Willey, this course caught Heidy'simagination. Professor Willey remained asource of inspiration and counsel for Heidythroughout her life, and his friendship servedto link her directly to the Vim Valley Project.Through Heidy's Harvard connection and hercontact with Harvard faculty such as GeoffreyConrad and Garth Bawden, she became awareof the intense excitement being generated bythe large projects on Peru's north coast thatinvolved students and faculty from Harvard,as well as many other universities. This lednaturally to her departure early in 1982 tospend four months in Casma working on theinvestigations of Carol Mackey and UlanaKlymyshn at Chimu administrative centers inthe Casma Valley.

In 1983 Heidy began the M.A. program inarchaeology at Yale; although I served as herprimary advisor, she also worked closely withMike Coe and Frank Hole. From her arrival atYale until her departUre in 1988, she wasclosely associated with the Division ofAnthropology at the Yale Peabody Museum ofNatural History. She took on myriad tasksthere with her characteristic energy and en-thusiasm. She helped catalogue collections,supervised undergraduate assistants and vol-unteers, and prepared text for and assisted inthe preparation of exhibits. In one unforget-table affair, she was suddenly whisked off toPittsburgh by the FBI to identify property thathad been stolen from the Museum. Heidyhelped the FBI to crack the thiers artifactcoding system and to discover that he hadrobbed five other prominent museums inaddition to ours.

The focus of Heidy's own original researchgravitated to one of the Yale Peabody's mostimportant Andean archaeological collections--the pottery recovered by Wendell Bennettduring his excavations in the Vim Valley.Although Bennett had published some of thesematerials in his usual prompt and efficientmanner, he had only scratched the surface ofthe collection's potential and Heidy decided to

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make the substantial sample of Gallinazoceramics the subject of her master's thesis. Sheutilized the stratigraphic information recordedby Bennett as the framework for reanalyzingthis pottery, concentrating on forms and theirassociation with decorative patterns ratherthan using the type-variety method employedby the Vim Valley Project. Her master's'thesis entitled "The Gallinazo Occupation ofthe Vim Valley, Peru" provided a lucid andwell-illustrated three-phase ceramic chrono-logy for the Gallinazo culture that wasanchored in well-defined stratigraphic rela-tionships. Unlike Bennett's ceramic chrono-logy, Heidy's sequence could be used to datethe full range of elaborate and utilitarianvessels, even those found individually ingraves or in small samples on site sUrfaces.This chronological control made it possiblefor her to trace the changing pattern ofsettlement in Vim during Gallinazo times andthis in turn led to numerous questions aboutGallinazo socioeconomic and 'politicalstructure beyond the Vim Valley.

On the basis of her success in the ar-chaeology program, she was admitted to thedoctoral program in Anthropology at Yale,and she completed her coursework and com-prehensive exams in 1987. In 1985 and 1987,she returned with support from the WilliamsFund, Sigma Xi, the Hazard Fund, and severalJoseph Albers' Traveling Fellowships to Peru'snorth coast to visit the sites described byBennett, Willey, and the other members of theVim Valley Project. Finally, in 1990 she wasawarded a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship to spendthe year in the Trujillo area re-surveying theGallinazo sites in Vim and comparing herobservations from this valley with sites andmaterials from neighboring valleys on thenorth coast. The sequence she had developedallowed her to date the rise of the Gallinazoculture in Vim and the subsequent expansionof Gallinazo traits into the adjacent drainages.Heidy was convinced by her research that shewas observing the rise of Peru's first multi-valley state and that the Gallinazo Siteconstituted the large urban capital of thispolity. She was also able to use her 1987restudy of the Vim Valley Project Gallinazogravelots in the collection of the American

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Museum of Natural History to confirmindependently her sequence and to add a newdimension to her reconstruction of Gallinazosocioeconomic organization. In her doctoraldissertation Settlements. in Time: A Study ofSocial and Political Development During theGallinazo Occupation of the North Coast ofPeru, presented in 1993, Heidy convincinglyargues that it was the Gallinazo rather than theMoche culture that pioneered large-scalestatecraft on the north coast, and that it wasonly with the collapse of the Gallinazo statecentered in Vim that the focus of power

. shifted to the Moche Valley at the beginningof Moche III. Support for her argument camefrom the redating of Gallinazo sites in Vim,Moche and Santa and the study of changingGallinazo settlement patterns in each of thesevalleys. .

Glimpses of Heidy's insights were offeredat numerous conferences and her ideas helpedto spark the renewed interest in the Galliriazoculture that has been evident since the mid-1980s. Unfortunately, .she did not publish herfindings and her master's and doctoral thesesremain unknown to most scholars. She didprepare sections on the Gallinazo Culture (vol.3, p. 9) and the Gallinazo Group Site (vol. 3,pp. 9-10) for the Encyclopedia of LatinAmerican History and Culture (CharlesScribner and Sons, 1996) and was in theprocess of finishing an article on the chrono-logy and political organization of theGallinazo Culture for Latin AmericanAntiquity at the time of her illness.

After completing her dissertation, Heidymoved to Washington to be with her husband,Hal VanGieson, an economist she met at Yalewhile both were graduate students. She took ajob as a Senior Archaeologist at EngineeringScience, a private firm involved in cultureresource management in the U.S. and LatinAmerica. While there, Heidy became engagedin project management, data analysis, and thecomputer mapping of both prehistoric andhistoric sites. She wanted to fmd a position ata museum or in academia, but her suddenillness cut short these hopes. In February of1994, it was discovered that Heidy had anadvanced form of cancer. At the time, she was

Burger: Heidy Fogel

four months pregnant. Without regard to herown safety, she delayed chemotherapy untilafter the baby was born. Despite the increasingseverity of her illness, Heidy remainedoptimistic to the end that one day she wouldbe able to return to the work and people she,loved so much. On May 26, 1994 shedelivered a healthy baby girl, Julia Rose VanGieson. In the months following the birth ofher daughter, Heidy's health deterioratedrapidly. She died in the same dramatic andpowerful way that she lived. Those of us whohad the opportunity and privilege of knowingHeidy will never forget the experience. Itremains my hope that her lasting contributionto Andean archaeology will be assured by thefuture publication of her dissertation, so thatthe enormous efforts she made during hershort career can serve as a sound basis for thecontinued growth of our understanding of theGallinazo culture and society.

Acknowledgments

In preparing the above obituary, I havedrawn upon materials provided to me byHeidi's husband, Hal VanGieson, and herfriend, Sue Benaron.