Linda Cordell was a superb scholar, a skilled administrator, and a wonderful person. She was a prolific writer, a superb field archaeologist, and a great mentor to a large number of students and colleagues. Her Archaeology of the Southwest is a standard reference (and recently was published in a third edition with Maxine McBrinn). Her accomplishments were deeply appreciated by her peers, as witnessed by her election to the National Academy of Sciences, her selection of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for American Archaeology, and the A.V. Kidder Medal from the American Anthropological Association, among many honors she received. I had great respect and affection for Linda and will really miss her.

I feel so fortunate to have known Linda. On top of her wealth of knowledge and experience, she sustained a deep intellectual curiosity and openness to ideas to the end of her life. I will truly miss her warmth, generosity, and brightness.

Linda was a person of rare courage and vision. She saw the world as a whole piece and devoted herself to those pieces that were nearest to her: the past as we see it here in New Mexico and its connections to the present and future. She cared deeply about the pueblos and worked with them, not in an abstract way, but directly and with a combination of compassion and legal experience. Her death is a real loss for all of us who knew her and worked with her. Last May Linda and I put together a working group for the Santa Fe Institute on the Legacies of the Manhattan Project. Working with her was great, I admired her strong and preceptive approach to a topic that was not in her main area, but where she did not fear to tread and saw a good question...how do big things happen? She had an inclusive and special sort of intelligence.
I will miss her very much.

During my time as a graduate student at CU Boulder, I worked for Linda at the University Museum. Someone in these articles wrote that her friends did not know when or how she began her career in archaeology.

Linda began her career during or shortly after the Vietnam war studying with Florence Hawley Ellis. This very start speaks to Linda's drive and determination as Florence was the only person who would take on female students at that time. Linda not only had an outstanding career but was a pioneer in creating the path for women in southwestern archaeology. I am a cultural anthropologist but studied with Linda to know more about the museum's world-class collections. I was fortunate to know her as a strong mentor to graduate students and, in her special way, to her women graduate students. For many reasons, I feel fortunate to have known her and have studied at Boulder during the particular years I was there. She is missed.