Archaeologists preserve history while building future

When Julia Mae Avery was a student at Colorado Women’s College in Denver, she was working on a paper dealing with the early history of Pueblo. Avery asked her dad, Pueblo dentist Willard S. Avery, for advice and he suggested she talk to a group of people in town that met regularly to discuss archaeology and history.

It was about the time that Western State University archaeologist C. T. Hurst and others from the Gunnison area had formed a group on the Western Slope that would be the beginning of the Colorado Archaeological Society and encouraged local groups to become official chapters.

By 1938, the Pueblo Archaeological and Historical Society officially had become a chapter of CAS and Avery, now 89, has been a dues-paying member ever since, even when her career as a school teacher took her to the coal camps of Northern Colorado.