1. Katharine Bartlett was an American physical anthropologist who worked from 1930 to 1952 as the first curator of the Museum of Northern Arizona, cataloging and organizing the museum's holdings, and then as the museum's librarian until 1974 and archivist until 1981.
Katharine Bartlett participated in a survey of the Navajo Nation's reservation in the Little Colorado River basin and established the cataloging system used by the Glen Canyon Archaeological Project.
Katharine Bartlett was a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the American Anthropological Association and a Fellow of the Society of American Archaeology, as well as the first Fellow of the MNA.
Katharine Bartlett was born on November 30,1907, in Denver, Colorado, to Louise Erina and George Frederick Bartlett.
Unable to afford her first choice of Smith College, Bartlett obtained her master's degree in physical anthropology from the University of Denver, studying under Etienne Bernardeau Renaud.
At the invitation of Harold Sellers Colton, who at the time was the preeminent expert in Southwestern US archaeological and ethnological research, Katharine Bartlett stayed on in Arizona to organize the two-year-old MNA, which Colton and his wife had founded.
Katharine Bartlett organized, cataloged, and preserved the museum's anthropology collection, serving from 1930 to 1952 as the museum curator.
In 1952, when Gene Field Foster, Katharine Bartlett's housemate, began recording archaeological sites in the area where the Glen Canyon Dam was being built, she invited Katharine Bartlett and the MNA to participate.
Katharine Bartlett established the catalog system for the archaeological collection of the Glen Canyon Project which was the largest project sponsored through the Interagency Archeological Salvage Program in the Santa Fe Regional Office of the National Park Service.
Katharine Bartlett was a charter member of the Arizona Academy of Science and the Arizona Association of University Women.
Katharine Bartlett was a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, of the American Anthropological Association, and the first Fellow of the MNA.
Katharine Bartlett died on May 22,2001, in Sedona, Arizona, and was posthumously inducted into the Arizona Women's Hall of Fame in 2008.