New Deal Archaeology in Tennessee: Intellectual, Methodological, and Theoretical Contributions
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New Deal Archaeology in Tennessee: Intellectual, Methodological, and Theoretical Contributions
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Overview
New Deal Archaeology in Tennessee tells the engrossing story of Southeastern archaeology in the 1930s. The Tennessee Valley Authority Act of May 1933 initiated an ambitious program of flood control and power generation by way of a chain of hydroelectric dams on the Tennessee River. The construction of these dams flooded hundreds of thousands of square miles of river bottoms, campsites, villages, and towns that had been homes to Native Americans for centuries. This triggered an urgent need to undertake extensive archaeological fieldwork throughout the region. Those studies continue to influence contemporary archaeology.
The state of Tennessee and the Tennessee Valley were especially well suited research targets thanks to their mild climate and long field seasons. A third benefit in the 1930s was the abundance of labor supplied by Tennesseans unemployed during the Great Depression. Within months of the passage of the Tennessee Valley Authority Act, teams of archaeologists fanned out across the state and region under the farsighted direction of Smithsonian Institution curators Neil M. Judd, Frank H. H. Roberts, and Frank M. Setzler. The early months of 1934 would become the busiest period of archaeological fieldwork in US history.
The twelve insightful essays in New Deal Archaeology in Tennessee document and explore this unique peak in archaeological study. Chapters highlight then-new techniques such as mound “peeling” and stratigraphic excavation adapted from the University of Chicago; the four specific New Deal sites of Watts Bar Reservoir, Mound Bottom, Pack, and Chickamauga Basin; bioarchaeology in the New Deal; and the enduring impact of the New Deal on contemporary fieldwork.
The challenges of the 1930s in recruiting skilled labor, training unskilled ancillary labor, developing and improvising new field methods, and many aspects of archaeological policies, procedures, and best-practices laid much of the foundation of contemporary archaeological practice. New Deal Archaeology in Tennessee offers an invaluable record of that pivotal time for professional, student, and amateur archaeologists.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817389581 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 06/30/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 296 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
New Deal Archaeology in Tennessee
Intellectual, Methodological, and Theoretical Contributions
By David H. Dye
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2016 University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8958-1
CHAPTER 1
W. C. McKern as Adviser, Consultant, and Godfather for New Deal Archaeology in Tennessee
Marlin F. Hawley and David H. Dye
Why is it important to revisit New Deal archaeology, now some 75 years past? For one, modern archaeology stands on the intellectual shoulders of prominent Tennessee Valley archaeologists such as David L. DeJarnette, William G. Haag, Madeline D. Kneberg, Thomas M. N. Lewis, W. C. McKern, and William S. Webb, who sought to bring forth a more scientific archaeology — one that laid the groundwork for many of today's practices and ideas about how we interpret and view the past. Their efforts are especially germane to the origins of contemporary publically funded research in contract archaeology. Another reason centers on the often-fashionable stance of criticizing New Deal archaeologists for not embracing today's theoretical and methodological approaches. We argue instead that understanding their motivations and personal backgrounds is fundamental to a nuanced awareness of how their approaches to archaeology were formulated and how their intellectual environment helped shape the course of archaeology for both the present and future generations.
To better understand the remarkable role played by W. C. McKern in the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) archaeology program, we take a closer look at his influence on Thomas M. N. Lewis before and during the federal work relief era. At the peak of his career in the late 1920s and 1930s, McKern was the single most important influence on Lewis's professional career, patiently directing Lewis toward archaeology as a science and as a profession, encouraging him to think about innovative excavation strategies and classification systems. His influence on Lewis is often overlooked, but as we suggest, McKern was a major behind- the-scenes force who provided intellectual support and served as a sounding board for Lewis in times of conflict and trouble. During the period from April 1937 to September 1939, Lewis and William S. Webb quarreled over control of funds, program development, and publication authorship (Dye 2013; Lyon 1996:144–146; Sullivan 1999:72–74). One major sticking point was whether the reports should be analytical and comprehensive, as Lewis envisioned them, or abbreviated and descriptive, as Webb requested and had done for his previous basin reports (Sullivan 1999:72).
W. C. McKern
Will Carleton "Mac" McKern was university trained under Alfred L. Kroeber at the University of California at Berkeley and evinced deep concern with field methods, typology, and other issues characteristic of the emergent culture-history school (Figure 1.1). Before and after military service as an infantryman in the trenches of World War I in France, McKern conducted field studies of California's indigenous people. He had also taught at the University of Washington. In the early 1920s, he served as the archaeologist for the Bishop Museum as part of the Dominick Expedition, directing pioneer fieldwork on the Tonga archipelago. From 1922 to 1924, he was employed as an assistant to Jesse W. Fewkes of the Smithsonian Institution during field investigations at Mesa Verde in Colorado (Lyman and O'Brien 2003; Rodell and Green 2004). McKern found his niche in 1925, however, when he was appointed head of the anthropology department at the Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM), a position he held until 1943, when he was named museum director (Lurie 1983; Lyman and O'Brien 2003).
At the MPM, McKern quickly became a productive force in Wisconsin archaeology, where he set into motion an ambitious program of survey and excavation across the state, mostly mound sites, beginning in 1925 and continuing, with a few interruptions, through 1936 (Rodell and Green 2004). On the national scene, "Mac" McKern, through the agency of the National Research Council's Committee on State Archaeological Surveys, was instrumental in originating and developing a taxonomic method to aid in culture classification, referred to as the Midwestern Taxonomic Method (MTM) (McKern 1939a; see Lyman and O'Brien 2003). Through his fieldwork with the Milwaukee Public Museum and service to the Wisconsin Archeological Society, National Research Council, and the Society for American Archaeology, for which he was named the first editor of American Antiquity, McKern has been credited for placing Upper Mississippi Valley archaeology on a sound scientific footing (Johnson 1948:346; Wittry 1959).
McKern's standing as an archaeologist in the eastern United States is reflected in his being asked by Neil Judd, of the National Research Council's subcommittee on the Archaeology of the Tennessee Valley, to serve as TVA archaeological consultant for the Norris and Wheeler Basin projects to begin in early January 1934. McKern refused the offer (Lyon 1996:40), explaining that he had his hands full with work at the MPM. William S. Webb, a physicist-turned-archaeologist at the University of Kentucky, was then offered the position, which he accepted (Schwartz, this volume; Schwartz 1967). Major Webb, an officer in World War I, came openly to view the organizational challenges in setting up the program and deploying personnel and materials across several basins in several states in military terms, likening the scale and logistics involved in TVA archaeological fieldwork to his experiences overseas in the Great War.
Thomas M. N. Lewis
Thomas M. N. Lewis had been a successful businessman and avocational archaeologist for 15 years prior to his involvement in TVA archaeology (Figure 1.2). Born in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, he grew up in Watertown, Wisconsin, the scion of industrialist George C. Lewis, who had early in the twentieth century taken over his father's wood manufacturing business, the G. B. Lewis Company. Lewis was educated at Northwestern College in Watertown and later at Lawrenceville Preparatory School in New Jersey. Lawrenceville prepared its charges for further academic work at nearby Princeton University, where Lewis completed an undergraduate degree in economics with a near perfect GPA. His education was interrupted by the outbreak of hostilities in Europe and with the United States's entry into the war; due to the war, he received his degree in 1920, but graduated as part of the Class of 1919.
From May 1917 through the end of 1918, Lewis served in the U.S. Naval Reserve Force as a boatswain's mate first class aboard a submarine chaser, scouting the Atlantic Coast of the United States for German submarines. In an oft-quoted remark, he later wrote Walter B. Jones of the Alabama Museum of Natural History in 1934 concerning the anticipated demands of his supervising field crews in the Norris Basin: "I had charge of a deck force for a year and a half during the World War and as a result of handling that tough bunch of hoodlums I don't believe that I would encounter many difficulties with a bunch of college boys and unemployed" (Lewis 1934a).
Despite Lewis's confidence, perhaps nothing could have prepared him for what lay ahead, including experience with unruly deckhands and an impressive Ivy League degree. Even the truculent Jesse D. Jennings (1994:89) once remarked, "In all fairness, I need to say that so little was known about Tennessee's prehistoric resources that probably no one, let alone Lewis, could have architected a research plan at the time." However, Lewis survived the ordeal of New Deal archaeology, and he, along with Madeline D. Kneberg and a host of dedicated field and lab supervisors, changed the course of Tennessee Valley archaeology and had an important impact on the study of eastern North American prehistory.
Lewis's success, in part, relied on someone who ranged between wingman and, in Lewis's own terms, "a sort of archaeological godfather" (Lewis 1937a). We suggest that Lewis might not have survived had he not had the advice, encouragement, and mentoring of W. C. McKern. One of McKern's young coworkers, Alton K. Fisher (1988:207), remembered McKern as "unreservedly devoted to his profession, which to him was both vocation and avocation, and delighted in sharing his enthusiasm for it with all who had similar interests. ... School youngsters with questions about archaeology, adult hobbyists, and professional archaeologists were equally welcome in his office or at his site of field operations. Some of the young people he influenced eventually became professional anthropologists." Lewis and McKern had two things in common: they both served in the Great War, and they were both passionate about the newly emerging scientific approach to archaeology. In McKern, Lewis found a confidant, friend, and mentor.
In any event, the road to Tennessee Valley archaeology was a circuitous one. After Princeton, Lewis briefly attended the University of Wisconsin, taking course work in animal husbandry (University of Wisconsin 1920:445). In 1921, he surrendered to fate and began work in the family business at the G. B. Lewis Company, and was quickly posted to Memphis, Tennessee, where he managed a newly established company distribution outlet. From there it was on to Lynchberg, Virginia, where in 1922–1923, he did the same for a distribution facility. Before returning to Wisconsin in 1923, he courted Leone C. Anderson of Lynchberg; the couple married in 1924 and took up residence in Watertown (Watertown Gazette 1923, 1924).
In charge of sales, Lewis often took to the road, traveling throughout much of the eastern United States on behalf of the company. Yet, even as his responsibilities with the G. B. Lewis Company expanded, his interest in artifacts grew and began to compete for more and more of his attention and resources. Lewis had been bitten with the collecting bug as a teenager, when he and his grandfather, Thomas M. Nelson, walked the fields around Chambersburg (Watertown Daily Times 1930).
While stationed in Virginia, Lewis collected extensively and made his first crude excavations, opening some mounds near Lynchburg (Lewis 1926). Business trips allowed him to scout for sites, and a steady income provided the means to acquire artifacts from throughout the country (Watertown Daily Times 1930). In what spare time he had, he sought solace from the pressures of work and family matters in the search for artifacts in the fields around Watertown. On one such occasion, a conversation with a couple of fellow collectors led him to apply for membership in the Wisconsin Archeological Society (WAS), which he joined in 1926 (Anonymous 1926). The WAS, no doubt, was a source of inspiration in Lewis's later efforts to reinvigorate an equivalent organization in Tennessee (Smith, this volume).
Through the remaining years of the decade, beginning in 1927, Lewis, sometimes with a few friends, dug mounds in Dane, Jefferson (including at the Mississippian town of Aztalan), and Sauk Counties in southern Wisconsin, often reporting the results at the monthly meetings of the WAS or through correspondence and brief reports submitted to the society's longtime secretary, Charles E. Brown (Lewis 1927, 1929a, 1929b). Elected successively to the WAS Public Collections Committee, State Survey Committee (Anonymous 1929a, 1929b) and its later incarnation, the Survey, Research, and Record Committee (Anonymous 1930:132), and the board of directors (including a vice president slot) (Anonymous 1934), Lewis attended as many of the society's monthly meetings as family and job permitted.
Lewis also exhibited portions of his collection and presented talks on his travels (Anonymous 1927a:67, 1927b:97). As fulfilling as these activities were, by the early 1930s, Lewis had begun to tire of Wisconsin's fields and set his sights on the south. With a work colleague, he ventured to the Florida panhandle, where the pair opened a wave-beaten mound on Santa Rosa Island, southeast of Pensacola (Lewis 1931, 1936).
Deciding that the American South and Midsouth was, at least in terms of archaeology, where he wanted to be, he threw in his lot with Fain King to be included in an archaeological survey along the Ohio River. He also participated in mound excavations, mostly at Wickliffe Mounds in Kentucky (Lewis 1932, 1934b; Wesler 2001:18–19). After excavations at Wickliffe in 1932, where he worked alongside David L. DeJarnette, James Hays, and Walter B. Jones, he crossed the Mississippi River into Arkansas and explored one or more sites south of Osceola in Mississippi County (Blytheville Courier News 1932; Milwaukee Public Museum n.d.).
Participation in the Wickliffe excavations gave Lewis his first bitter taste of scientific controversy, as the NRC looked to prune some of the more unruly branches of what passed for archaeology, including King's perceived turn to rampant commercialism (Wesler 2001). The resulting efforts by the NRC to censure King soon engulfed Lewis, to his great dismay. The Lewis-McKern correspondence from this period, from 1930 through 1933, documents Lewis's intellectual maturation as the drama surrounding King and the Wickliffe site, when refracted through his friendship with McKern, transformed his understanding of archaeology as a profession and a science.
For what he was to become, in fact, his friendship with McKern was pivotal. The two probably met at one of the WAS monthly meetings as early as 1926. As their friendship grew — traced across their correspondence in the shift from "Dear Mr. McKern" and "Dear Mr. Lewis" to the sobriquets "Dear Mac" and "Dear Tom" — Lewis traveled near and far to visit McKern's field camps and by the early 1930s, he became almost a fixture in Mac's office at the MPM. McKern and his colleagues for their part were fairly frequent visitors to the Lewis home in Watertown.
From McKern and his associates, Lewis learned how to reconstruct pottery vessels, a skill he put to use after his Santa Rosa Island dig and for pottery recovered from Wickliffe (Lewis 1930, 1933a). He adopted MPM procedures in his effort to organize and classify his personal collection. McKern's field methods, on full display to Lewis during his visits to the MPM field camps, were lauded by no less an authority than Albert C. Spaulding (1983:20) as "The basic methods that we still use." McKern (1927) advocated two approaches to mound investigation, which were the raison d'être of the MPM: trenching and complete removal, with the former method employed most often, partly as a time- and cost-saving measure (Rodell and Green 2004:35). In his own fieldwork, Lewis followed McKern's example and soon resorted to trenching as well; further, he carried these methods with him to Tennessee, where it quickly became evident that a wider repertoire of excavation methods would have to be developed because of field crew sizes, the demands and protocols of the New Deal bureaucratic politics, and the complexity of the sites (Lewis and Kneberg 1938; Nash 1940).
Through their regular correspondence, Lewis and McKern worried about issues of mutual concern, including the relationship between amateurs and professionals and methodological issues, including artifact classification. During this time, at McKern's insistence, Lewis began to pen articles for The Wisconsin Archeologist (Lewis 1931, 1932, 1934b) and other journals (Lewis 1933a). He also participated in the WAS and the Central Section of the American Anthropological Association to the fullest of his ability. Through these organizations, his network of acquaintances broadened to include notables such as Glenn Black (Indiana Historical Society), Charles E. Brown (Wisconsin Historical Society), Fay-Cooper Cole (University of Chicago), Thorne Deuel (University of Chicago), Carl E. Guthe (National Research Council), Eli Lilly (Indiana Historical Society), and William S. Webb (University of Kentucky).
But it was McKern's friendship, his patient mentorship in point of fact, that meant the most to Lewis and that would prove so crucial in his mounting desire to make the leap from collector to amateur archaeologist to the rank of professional archaeologist (Dye and Hawley 2014). By late fall 1933, Lewis had come to a realization — if not an epiphany — concerning his life's goals. Writing to McKern, he observed: "I have reached the point now where the commercial world has less appeal to me than it ever has had if that is possible. I desire eventually to make anthropology my profession if it will offer me an opportunity to eke out an existence for my family" (Lewis 1933b).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from New Deal Archaeology in Tennessee by David H. Dye. Copyright © 2016 University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsPreface
Acknowledgments
An Overview of Federal Work Relief Projects in Tennessee and the Tennessee Valley, 1933–1942
An Introduction by David H. Dye
Part I. Archaeologists and the New Deal
Chapter 1. W. C. McKern as Adviser, Consultant, and Godfather for New Deal Archaeology in Tennessee by Marlin F. Hawley and David H. Dye
Chapter 2. New Deal Archaeology and the Chicago Method by Jessica R. Howe
Chapter 3. William S. Webb and the Paradoxical Leadership of TVA Archaeology by Douglas W. Schwartz
Part II. Archaeology and the New Deal in Tennessee
Chapter 4. Reinterpreting the Shell Mound Archaic in Western Tennessee: A GIS-Based Approach to Radiocarbon Sampling of New Deal–Era Site Collections by Thaddeus G. Bissett
Chapter 5. Depression-Era Archaeology in the Watts Bar Reservoir, East Tennessee by Shannon Koerner and Jessica Dalton-Carriger
Chapter 6. WPA Excavations at the Mound Bottom and Pack Sites in Middle Tennessee, 1936–1940 by Michael C. Moore, David H. Dye, and Kevin E. Smith
Chapter 7. Reconfiguring the Chickamauga Basin by Lynne P. Sullivan
Chapter 8. Bioarchaeological Analysis of the WPA Mound Bottom Skeletal Sample by Heather Worne, Giovanna M. Vidoli, and Dawnie Wolfe Steadman
Part III. The Legacy of the New Deal
Chapter 9. The Tennessee Archaeological Society from 1944 to 1985: Legacy and Consequences of the New Deal in Tennessee by Kevin E. Smith
Chapter 10. Tennessee's New Deal Archaeology on the National Stage by Bernard K. Means
Chapter 11. Comments on New Deal Archaeology in Tennessee, Then and Now by Gerald F. Schroedl
Contributors
Index