Beginning in March 1933 with the excavation of the Marksville mound site in Louisiana, and throughout the next decade, ordinary citizens labored in New Deal jobs programs and participated in archaeological excavations across the United States. Under the auspices of work relief programs, people were provided the opportunity to explore and document American Indian villages and mounds, important historic places, and homes associated with events and people critical to the foundation of the country.
Utilizing primary sources that include correspondence and unpublished reports, Lyon demonstrates the great importance of the New Deal projects in the history of southeastern and North American archaeology.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.
This book examines the profound impacts of the Smithsonian Institution's River Basin Surveys and the Interagency Archeological Salvage Program (1945-1969) on the development of American archaeology.
From the American Side I went to the USSR for the first time in 1982 to attend the 11th meeting of the International Union for Quaternary research (INQUA) held at the Moscow State University. At that time relations between our two countries were anything but congenial and many restrictions were placed on our viewing the archaeological and paleontological collections and labora tory facilities. This was not the ideal climate for the free exchange of ideas needed for meaningful research. However, it was obvious to us that the strained relations did not extend to scientific discussions between scholars. We left that meeting well aware that if the problems of prehistoric Old World-New World relationships were to be resolved, it would eventually require cooperative research efforts within the world community of archaeologists. At that time, the pre-Clovis problem in New World archaeology was foremost in the minds of many North American researchers: tool technology and assemblages were being studied as a possible means of establishing cultural relationships across the Bering Strait, Clovis sites and mammoth kills were being looked at with new ideas for interpretation, and New World researchers realized that to resolve these questions they had to become familiar with the archaeological record of northeast Asia. A chance meeting of the writer with Olga Soffer in 1983 led to serious discussions of the sites on the Russian or East European Plain.
J. M. Adovasio has spent the last thirty years at the center of one of our most fiery scientific debates: Who were the first humans in the Americas, and how and when did they get there? At its heart, The First Americans is the story of the revolution in thinking that Adovasio and his fellow archaeologists have brought about, and the firestorm it has ignited. As he writes, “The work of lifetimes has been put at risk, reputations have been damaged, an astounding amount of silliness and even profound stupidity has been taken as serious thought, and always lurking in the background of all the argumentation and gnashing of tenets has been the question of whether the field of archaeology can ever be pursued as a science.”