Archaeology

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations. I'm sure there was a time when I wanted to be a cowboy, or a fireman, or an astronaut, but I can't actually recall wanting to be anything other than an archaeologist. As a boy, I loved the outdoors, camping, and the idea of living off the land. That led me to an interest in Native Americans and in how they used to live. I read what I could, searched for caves, and I walked the fields of a neighboring dairy farmer to collect arrowheads. I became interested in anything old, and so I traced colonial roads from old maps in the town library, mapped the crumbled foundations of old riverside mills, and raked through historic dumps for bottles (OK, that's looting and you shouldn't do that; I was only 12 at the time). I filled my bedroom with arrowheads, bones and fossils. Fortunately, my parents indulged this hobby, and when I was very young, my mother gave me a copy of Sir Leonard Woolley's 1962 book, The Young Archaeologist; it still sits on the desk in my university office. You might think this an odd childhood, but actually many professional archaeologists found their passion at a young age. National Geographic captivated me, especially articles about "primitive" people in far-off places, and Jane Goodall's research with chimpanzees. The magazine led me to Louis and Mary Leakey who, at the time, the 1960s, were discovering the remains of early human ancestors in eastern Africa. I yearned to be there, in Olduvai Gorge, walking through those barren hillsides looking for tiny scraps of bone. Although I grew up in New England, my heart has always been in open country, windswept deserts, and mountains. In 1973, when I was 16, a thoughtful high school guidance counselor showed me a brochure for Educational Expeditions International (EEI); today it's known as Earthwatch. This group matches interested volunteers with field scientists - such as geologists, biologists, zoologists, and archaeologists. At the time, EEI gave scholarships for high school students to spend a summer working on a project. I applied for and received one, and was sent to work with David Hurst Thomas, an archaeologist at the American Museum of Natural History, who was excavating a cave in central Nevada. Thomas was a rising star, and it was my good luck to have crossed paths with him. I continued working with David for years, until I began my own doctoral field research in western Nevada. Today, he and I coauthor two archaeology college textbooks. Over the past 40-odd years, I've been able to participate in field projects throughout the western U.S., as well as in the southeast, in New York City (where I excavated on Wall Street - and far below the water table), in Maine, and Kentucky. I've worked on an Inca site in the foothills of the Andes Mountains, on the edge of Chile's Atacama Desert. I've excavated 13,000-year-old "paleoindian" campsites, nineteenth century trash middens, human burials, pueblos, and caves -- in deserts and humid forests, from coasts to 12,000 foot mountain peaks. I've also done ethnographic research in Madagascar with the Mikea, a group of horticulturalist/hunter-gatherers. Through all of this work I remained interested in hunter-gatherers. I admit that my initial attraction was romantic. There was something very earthy and genuine about people who live simply, using their ingenuity and effort to harvest what nature provides, and leaving only a small footprint behind. It seemed to me that hunter-gatherers were closest to how I thought humans should live--peacefully, in small groups, with few material possessions. Of course, like most of the things we believe as youths, this one was partly an illusion. Hunter-gatherers can be violent and territorial - and materialistic: one young Mikea man in Madagascar once asked me to bring him "an airplane, or maybe a tractor," and another asked me for everything I had, right down to my wedding ring. I like to think that I've matured, but my fascination with hunter-gatherers continues. As many anthropologists point out, humanity has spent 99 percent of its existence as hunter-gatherers; foraging was an enormously successful adaptation. Consequently, you can't study hunter-gatherers without thinking about what early human life was like and how we came to be the species that we are. And that leads me to wonder why we changed, why we became agriculturalists and why we developed cities, armies, slavery, and ruling classes. If a simple technology coupled with life in small, egalitarian, nomadic groups worked so well for so long, why did we give it up? Why aren't we still hunter-gatherers living on the African savanna? In 1974, I left high school a year early (over the objections of my high school principle: "You'll never get anywhere without a high school diploma!") to attend Cornell University, where I received my BA in anthropology in 1978; I received my MA also in anthropology from the University of New Mexico in 1980 (where I was able to study under the formidable Lewis Binford), and my doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1985. I taught for a semester at Colby College in Maine, and in 1986 moved to the University of Louisville. I have been a professor of anthropology since 1997 at the University of Wyoming. My research focuses on hunter-gatherers, stone tool technology, and archaeological theory; I use the theoretical approach of human behavioral ecology. I have served in a number of leadership capacities, including a total of nine years as department head for both the University of Wyoming and the University of Louisville, and as Director of the Frison Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Wyoming. I have also served as President of the Society for American Archaeology, one of the largest bodies of professional archaeologists in the world, and as secretary of the Archaeology Division of the American Anthropological Association. I am currently editor of the journal American Antiquity, the leading publication on American archaeology. I have authored over 100 articles, books, and reviews, including two of the most widely-used university archaeology textbooks in the U.S., Archaeology and Archaeology: Down to Earth (both with David Hurst Thomas). My most recent book is The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers (Cambridge University Press, 2013). I have lectured in the UK (Cambridge, Oxford, and London), France, the Netherlands, Germany, Finland, Argentina, Australia, Russia, Taiwan, China, and Japan. In 2012 I was a Visiting Overseas Scholar at Cambridge University. I am currently researching caves in Wyoming's Bighorn Basin, and the archaeology of ice patches in Glacier National Park, Montana, U.S.A, and in the mountains of Wyoming. Read more about this author Read less about this author Read more about this author Read less about this author