In Memoriam
                                   JOHN R. GUTH 
                                                   1941–2025

     John Guth, a long-time member of the Albuquerque Archaeological Society, died February 21, 2025 at the age of 83 after a long illness. He was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania and grew up in various small industrial mill towns in Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, and Kansas where his father was a plant manager for a cement company. Following high school in Iola, Kansas, John graduated with a BS in electrical engineering from the University of Kansas in 1962. He and his high school sweetheart Barbara Pees Guth enjoyed a happy marriage for 47 years until her death in 2008. After his college graduation he and Barbara moved to Albuquerque, where he started working at Sandia National Laboratories and attending the University of New Mexico, graduating with an MS in electrical engineering in 1964. He worked at Sandia Labs for 52 years, rising to the rank of Deputy Director for Center Operations, Nuclear and Risk Technologies enter, and retiring in 2014.
     John turned to other pursuits in retirement, among them an interest in rock art, which he explored first with the Albuquerque Archaeological Society’s team that recorded the petroglyphs on the Diamond Tail Ranch near Golden.  He also served on the AAS Board as Treasurer.  He joined the Rock Art Council of the Archaeological Society of New Mexico as its Secretary, and he later joined the Board of Directors of the Mesa Prieta Petroglyph Project, where his management skills were employed in serving as a liaison with the Archaeological Records Management Section of the Historic Preservation Division of New Mexico. He worked with ARMS personnel to facilitate the transfer of MPPP’s extensive digitized records to the New Mexico Cultural Resource Information System, or NMCRIS. 
     While at ARMS, John learned that rock art reports prepared by volunteers are not processed into the ARMS files because there is no funding for that undertaking. He and another volunteer processed a number of long-neglected rock art records and were making good progress when issues of security were raised and the program was ended. John had a solution for this: a donation from AAS to fund the compensation of a student intern's work on the remaining reports over the summer.  The plan was being considered when the pandemic put it on hold, and the onset of John’s illness later prevented his pursuing further action.
      Among John’s other interests was farming on property he owned near Los Lunas. In working there he collected a number of pottery sherds and lithic artifacts that are illustrated and analyzed by Hayward Franklin  in “Coalition Phase Pottery from Los Lunas, New Mexico and the Ceramic Sequence in the Middle Rio Grande Valley” published in ASNM Volume 46, A Lifelong Journey: Papers in Honor of Michael P. Marshall (2020).
     As I knew him, if only slightly, John was a quiet and rather modest person who preferred to work in the background, but his many contributions to the archaeological community well deserve this late recognition after his long twilight.
​                                  ~ Helen Crotty, Editor Emerita