A New Deal for Southeastern Archaeology

by Edwin A. Lyon

Overview

Recipient of the 1994 Anne B. and James B. McMillan Prize

This comprehensive study provides a history of New Deal archaeology in the Southeast in the 1930s and early 1940s and focuses on the projects of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Civil Works Administration, the Works Progress Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the National Park Service, and the Smithsonian Institution.

Utilizing primary sources including correspondence and unpublished reports, Lyon demonstrates the great importance of the New Deal projects in the history of southeastern and North American archaeology. New Deal archaeology transformed the practice of archaeology in the Southeast and created the basis for the discipline that exists today. With the current emphasis on curation and repatriation, archaeologists and historians will find this volume invaluable in reconstructing the history of the projects that generated the many collections that now fill our museums.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780817383817
Publisher:	University of Alabama Press
Publication date:	05/20/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	300
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Edwin A. Lyon is an archaeologist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, New Orleans District, and Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University.

Read an Excerpt

A New Deal for Southeastern Archaeology

---

By Edwin A. Lyon

The University of Alabama Press

Copyright © 1996 The University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8381-7

---

CHAPTER 1

Southeastern Archaeology before the Depression

Prehistoric archaeology in the United States developed during the twentieth century as one of four components of the discipline of anthropology: ethnology, physical anthropology, linguistics, and archaeology. Within anthropology, ethnology was the dominant force before the 1930s. Archaeology as it was practiced in the early twentieth century was of little value to many anthropologists. A few archaeologists had done good work, but the typical archaeologist, in the words of J. Alden Mason, "was a congenital antiquarian, attracted to the ancient, the rare, the spectacular." Franz Boas, the most important figure in American anthropology in the early twentieth century, was aware that archaeology could contribute to anthropology, but was unimpressed with archaeologists. According to Mason, "A cynical remark attributed to him, even if apocryphal, probably expresses his attitude: 'If a man finds a pot, he is an archeologist; if two, a great archeologist; three, a renowned archeologist!'"

Archaeology had little to offer at that time to anthropologists interested in understanding the history of Native Americans. As Alfred Kroeber pointed out, "Incredible as it may now seem, by 1915-25 so little time perspective had been achieved in archaeology that Wissler and I, in trying to reconstruct the native American past, could then actually infer more from the distributions and typology of ethnographic data than from the archaeologists' determinations. Our inferences were not too exact, but they were broader than those from excavations." Not only lack of archaeological knowledge but the refusal of physical anthropologists to recognize the presence of humans in the New World before the very recent past limited the importance of archaeology in anthropology. Failure to recognize time depth in eastern North America led to a short prehistoric chronology with changes occurring rapidly as the result of movement of population or spread of cultural traits by diffusion.

This domination of archaeology by ethnology benefited archaeology by expanding archaeologists' interests in broader anthropological questions but also limited the development of the field. Boas and his followers opposed any role for cultural evolutionism in anthropology leading to emphasis on cultural relativism and historical particularism. This opposition to cultural evolutionism effectively prevented concern with broader issues of change in Native American cultures. As Gordon Willey and Jeremy Sabloff point out, "The distrust of evolutionary thinking and the marked historical particularism of American anthropology forced the American archaeologist into a niche with a very limited horizon."

Lack of time perspective led to reliance on space rather than time as the primary interpretative approach of ethnologists and archaeologists. As late as 1923 Kroeber noted that one of the major characteristics of the native cultures of the New World was that "they have come to us virtually in momentary cross section, flat and without perspective. In general there are few historic data extant about them." Kroeber argued that the history of the Native Americans had to be studied through "the medium of space." "As soon," Kroeber said, "as knowledge of American cultures became orderly, its organization was inevitably effected in terms of geography." This geographical approach established culture areas, "a non-philosophical, inductive, mainly unimpeachable organization of phenomena analogous to the 'natural classification of animals and plants on which systematic biology rests." Kroeber listed ten culture areas for North America including the Southeast or Southern Woodland.

While in the southwestern United States stratigraphy was developing as a means of understanding culture history, this approach was not transferred to the Southeast. As Willey observed for all of American archaeology, "Frequent gross observations were made on superposition in refuse strata, in structures, or in graves; and, on occasion, differences in pottery or other artifacts were correlated with these observations, but, for some reason, this did not seem to lead on to the establishment of local, regional, or areal culture sequences." Willey concluded that "the stratigraphic method did not become truly viable in American archaeology until after 1920."

The approach Gerard Fowke used in mounds in Colbert County, Alabama, was typical of many archaeologists working in the Southeast before the depression. "The numerous worked objects scattered throughout that portion of the mound which was excavated, and presumably in all other parts of it as well, being merely derelicts, so to speak, not distinctive in material, form, or in any other respect, cast no light upon the identity of the tribe who may have made them or the time at which the users may have left them here. Consequently no necessity exists for entering into particulars regarding the depth or the part of the mound where they were discovered. Only unusual features will be herein recorded; burials, of course, will be somewhat fully described."

NORTHERN SUPPORT FOR SOUTHEASTERN ARCHAEOLOGY

Southeastern archaeology developed slowly before the New Deal. Southern universities were poor and unable to provide support for research and publication in archaeology. The development of northern anthropological museums during the last half of the nineteenth century increased support for southeastern archaeology during what has been called the museum era of American anthropology. Much of southeastern archaeology before the 1930s was supported by non-southeastern museums such as the Smithsonian Institution, the Peabody Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Heye Foundation. The National Research Council was the one non-museum institution that assisted southeastern archaeologists.

The Peabody Museum of Harvard University, founded in 1866, was an important supporter of early southeastern archaeology. The Peabody first concentrated its collecting in the eastern United States, accumulating large collections from New England, Florida, the Middle Atlantic area, Tennessee, the Ohio Valley, Michigan, and Missouri. Later the museum collected in the Southwest, the West, and Middle America. Jeffries Wyman, an anatomist, was the first curator at the Peabody Museum from 1866 until he died in 1874. He dug in shell middens in New England and then turned to the St. John's area of Florida in 1867, with additional work in 1869, 1871, and 1874. He published preliminary studies followed by his major report in 1875. Wyman showed that shell heaps were the result of human activities rather than natural processes. He analyzed pottery and faunal material, concluding that mounds without pottery were older than those containing pottery and that plain and incised pottery was older than stamped-decorated pottery.

In 1875 Frederic W. Putnam became curator of the Peabody Museum. In the 1880s the museum began work in mounds in the eastern United States with Putnam continuing Wyman's collecting procedure of collaboration with field workers. Putnam concentrated on mounds in Ohio, at Madisonville and the Turner group. He was instrumental in the purchase and transfer of the Serpent Mound to the Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society. In the Southeast he concentrated his attention on Kentucky and Tennessee. Early archaeological study of the Upper Tennessee River was conducted by the Reverend E. O. Dunning for the Peabody Museum of Harvard and the Peabody Museum of Yale, the only involvement of Yale's museum in the Southeast in this period. Dunning's work in Tennessee was supported by Wyman with $300 a year from 1868 to 1871. The Peabody Museum sent Edward Palmer to Texas and northern Mexico in 18791880, and his investigations included visits to sites in east Texas. Edwin Curtis worked during the winter of 1879 in the St. Francis River Valley in Arkansas, collecting from a number of sites, including the Rose Mound, Fortune Mound, Stanley Mounds (Parkin), and the Holcomb Mound.

The Peabody Museum sent Charles Peabody and W. C. Farabee to Coahoma County, Mississippi, where they excavated two mounds, the Dorr Mound and the Edwards Mound, over three months in 1901 and 1902. Peabody was aware of stratification in the Edwards Mound, identifying layers of soil, ashes, and charcoal. He recognized that pottery, bundle burials, and animal bones were more plentiful in an upper level than in a lower level, leading him to conclude that the mound was built in two periods, the more recent postColumbian.

The Stalling's Island site near Augusta, Georgia, was excavated early in 1929 by C. B. Cosgrove of the Peabody Museum, using about fifteen workers. William H. Claflin, Jr., had dug into the site beginning in 1908 and again during 1920 and prepared a report on the 1929 project. Using more than 3,500 sherds recovered from the site, he identified a long occupation by the Stalling's Island people followed by later visitors to the site. Pottery decoration was similar at all levels. Claflin concluded that the Stalling's Island people lived in the Savannah River Valley before later makers of paddle-stamped pottery.

The American Museum of Natural History in New York also played an important role in early twentieth-century southeastern archaeology. The museum, founded in 1869, opened its new building in 1873. It supported ethnological and archaeological research in a variety of areas in the United States, primarily in the West. One important early project of the museum was in the Southeast, Harlan Smith's investigations at Fox Farm and a survey of the area in the summer of 1895. Smith knew that the site was prehistoric but could not estimate its age. He recognized that the pottery was part of the Ohio Valley group rather than the Mississippi Valley group. He concluded that the Fort Ancient culture was present in Kentucky.

In 1905 when Clark Wissler became head of the department of anthropology at the museum he planned a program of archaeological investigations. The emphasis of the museum would be on the Southwest, Mexico, and Central and South America, but Nels C. Nelson would work in the Southeast for the museum. Nelson, born in Denmark in 1875, received a B.L. from the University of California in 1907 and a M.L. in 1908. He was an assistant curator at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of California from 1909 to 1912, assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History from 1912 to 1920, associate curator from 1921 to 1927, and became curator of prehistoric archaeology in 1928. In addition to his training in the United States, Nelson studied European archaeological methods in France.

Nelson's most important work in the Southeast was in Kentucky and Florida. In May and November of 1916, Nelson investigated Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. He argued that cave archaeology should be as valuable in the United States as it had been in Europe. Caves were more useful in working out chronology than mounds or village sites because "nowhere else can we be quite so sure of the validity of stratigraphic results as in cave floor deposits." He saw shell heaps as almost as useful for coastal areas and pointed out that "shell heaps have not yet been adequately investigated."

E. H. Sellards, Florida's state geologist, informed the museum in April 1917 that a large shell mound at Oak Hill, Florida, was being destroyed for road construction material. When Nelson arrived in Florida for a few days work, he found one-seventh of the mound remaining after two steam shovels had dug out nearly two thousand carloads of shell over four months. No pottery was found in the bottom layer of the midden, plain sherds in the middle, and "checker-stamp decorated ware" in the upper level of the site. Nelson noted that check-stamped ware probably originated near the Indian River, where it was found deposited above undecorated sherds.

Another northern sponsor of archaeology in the Southeast was the Museum of the American Indian. George G. Heye began collecting artifacts in the 1890s. In 1903 Heye acquired his first important collection from New Mexico. Collecting expeditions followed in Arizona, Central America, and the Caribbean. In 1916 Heye founded the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation. In addition to collecting, Heye also dug sites including several mounds in Haywood County, North Carolina, in the spring of 1915. The Nacoochee Mound in Georgia, a domiciliary mound 17 feet high, was partially excavated by Heye in the summer of 1915 in cooperation with the Bureau of American Ethnology. The excavation revealed the stratigraphy of the mound, including layers of red-burned earth, dark clay, and 6 feet of clay with specks of charcoal. Although the excavators did not consider the stratification well defined, it indicated to them that the mound had been built in several periods. They thought it was a typical Cherokee earthwork occupied in both prehistoric and historic times.

The Museum of the American Indian became interested in Arkansas after seeing the results of Clarence B. Moore's work. Moore recommended work in the Red River Valley, and Mark R. Harrington began work for the museum in the area in February 1915. Harrington had received his B.S. from Columbia University in 1907 and his A.M. in 1908. He was an assistant anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History from 1899 to 1902. He worked as a field ethnologist for the Museum of the American Indian from 1908 to 1910 and as an assistant curator in the American section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum from 1911 to 1914. He returned to work for the Museum of the American Indian as archaeologist and ethnologist from 1915 to 1917 and again from 1919 to 1928. Flooding in the Red River Valley drove Harrington out of the valley and into other areas of southwestern Arkansas where he studied approximately twenty sites over two years. In 1922 and 1923 Harrington worked in caves in the northwestern part of the state. The caves were filled with dry dust, forcing the archaeologists to wear a "respirator," a kind of gas mask. From August to December 1919, Harrington searched for sites along the Tennessee River between Nashville and Chattanooga but concentrated his attention on the area between the Little Tennessee and Hiwassee rivers. Harrington found the remains of the Round Grave culture at the bottom of each site. Above this level he found a Cherokee-like culture that built most of the burial mounds. Next came the remains of the Cherokee. James B. Stoltman, in his review of the history of southeastern archaeology, viewed Harrington's work as important in the history of southeastern archaeology because "he was a leader in the rediscovery of the scientific value of village refuse excavation."

The Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, also supported southeastern archaeology even before the establishment of its Department of Anthropology in 1906. Beginning in 1896 Warren K. Moorehead purchased collections for Robert S. Peabody. In 1897 he collected in New Mexico and later dug in the Southwest. Later he employed collectors who dug in Ohio and collected in Tennessee, Arkansas, and other areas. In January 1903 Moorehead and a crew of less than ten men opened more than one hundred graves at Hopkinsville, Kentucky. The laborers dug between twenty and thirty holes daily and examined "quite thoroughly" about two acres. Moorehead and his crew used a barge to visit sites in Tennessee.

In 1915 Moorehead decided to survey the Arkansas River Valley. He traveled upstream, finding mounds of the valley to be similar to the "pottery belt" of the middle Mississippi Valley. During winters from 1925 to 1927 Moorehead worked at the Etowah site in Georgia concentrating on Mound C and the village. In the winter of 1924 Moorehead worked at Natchez, Mississippi, because he wanted to compare the Hopewell with the description of the Natchez that John R. Swanton had provided in his 1911 study, Indian Tribes of the Lower Mississippi Valley. Moorehead did preliminary work at a number of sites including the Emerald Mound, the Anna group, and the Ferguson mounds. Despite many large pits and auger tests in a number of mounds, he was disappointed to find no evidence of a high culture in the area.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from A New Deal for Southeastern Archaeology by Edwin A. Lyon. Copyright © 1996 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Contents
Illustrations
Preface
Prologue
1 Southeastern Archaeology before the Depression
2 The Origin of New Deal Archaeology
3 Archaeology in the 1930s
4 WPA Archaeology
5 TVA Archaeology
6 National Park Service Archaeology
7 The Legacy of New Deal Archaeology
Epilogue: New Deal Archaeology Today
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

A history of New Deal Archaeology in the Southeast during the 1930s and 1940s, chronicling the projects of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Civil Works Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Smithsonian. Lyon (geography and anthropology, Louisiana State U.) demonstrates through research based in correspondence and unpublished reports how New Deal archaeology transformed archeological practices in the Southeast, creating the foundations for today's discipline. Recipient of the 1994 Anne B. and James B. McMillan Prize. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

"A founding reference to an analytical history of southeastern archaeology. . . . Thorough, solid, and valuable."
—American Antiquity


"The story of one of the most exciting chapters in the history of American science: the transformation of archaeology from dilettante's hobby to scientific profession . . . Lyon portrays this magnificent contribution with skill and enthusiasm, and a historian's fine appreciation for detail."
—Public Archaeology Review

From the Publisher