Back to Kansas

Abstract

I was the State Archeologist in Kansas for 34 years, 1960-1994. It was good, and I was doing something I liked in a place I liked. I am a native Kansan, born in Wichita. However, my family moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, when I was 10. These circumstances in no small way influenced my career. My major education, therefore, was in Lincoln public schools and the University of Nebraska. I enrolled at the university with a major in geology, but after two years I tired of college and set out to seek my fortune, returning to Kansas to work for a seismograph company that performed oil exploration in the central and western parts of the state. I began my job as a shooter's helper, preparing dynamite charges, but that did not seem to have much future. I changed to a surveyor trainee, learning the use of the alidade for mapping. The Korean Conflict was in progress, and I was soon drafted into the Army. After basic training, I attended a signal school course for six months and trained as a radio repairman. The war ended while I was still in signal school. I was stationed at a small Army airfield at Ft Eustis, Virginia, until December 1954. In August 1954 I married Mary Anne Schlegel, my fiancee, in Lincoln. We now have two children, David and Linda, and four grandchildren. Returning to Lincoln, it was back to the university, a wiser and more focused student. The geology majors, whom I had met five years before, were still there as graduate students. There were no jobs. Earlier, I had taken one course in anthropology and liked it. I then chose anthropology as my major with geology as a second major. The latter would prove very useful in evaluating geomorphology and identifying lithic materials. In 1957 I was the only student to sign up for the archaeology field school. This was a very fortunate event in my life. It was arranged that I would go out with the Nebraska State Historical Society's field crew on its first season at the Early Archaic Logan Creek site. Marvin Kivett was the archaeologist and became my mentor. As his foreman the next summer, I helped excavate a historic Iowa village site on the Platte River, and later I did highway survey on 1-80. I graduated in January 1959 with a B.A. and was given a position of Graduate Assistant in the Anthropology Department. That summer I was the field supervisor for the department's field school and directed limited excavations at the Sterns Creek and Logan Creek sites. However, our major effort was at the Lynch site, a late Middle Ceramic village in northeastern Nebraska. I was grateful to have my wife Mary Anne as our camp cook that season and three more to come. This Lynch site work was to gain data and specimens for my Master's thesis on the Anoka focus. I received by M.A. in 1962 (Witty 1962a). I was finishing my credit hours for the M.A. degree in the spring of 1960 when Kivett told me of the newly created position for an archaeologist at the Kansas State Historical Society in To' peka. I applied and with Kivett's recommendation was hired and moved one more time to Kansas. The Kansas State Historical Society was the first Kansas institution whose staff carried out fieldwork to record archaeological sites in the state. As early as 1880 Franklin Adams, the Society's secretary, mapped the Kanza Blue Earth Village (1800-1830) and recorded information on Hard Chief's Village (1830-1847) for the Society's manuscript collection. A number of classic articles, dealing with Native American cultures as well as archaeology, were published, namely those by S. W. Williston and H. T. Martin on early archaeological finds in western Kansas, by J. R.