The 2010 Gordon Willey Symposium on New Deal Archaeology at the SAA Annual Meeting, St. Louis, Missouri, and Other Activities of the SAA's History of Archaeology Interest Group

Bernard K Means

doi:10.5334/bha.20209

Abstract

The Biennial Gordon Willey Symposium on the History of Archaeology at the 2010 Society for American Archaeology (SAA) meetings this past April was well received and was one of three featured sessions at the SAA meeting. As reported in an earlier Bulletin (Means 2009), the Willey Symposium was sponsored by the SAA’s History of Archaeology Interest Group (HAIG) and was entitled ‘Shovel Ready: Archaeology & Roosevelt’s New Deal for America’.

Highlights

An edited volume on this New Deal archaeology session is planned, with expected publication by the University of Alabama Press in late 2011, or more likely, in early 2012 – in time for the Biennial Gordon Willey Symposium to be held as part of the SAAs in Memphis, Tennessee
I briefly discussed the New Deal work relief programs that funded the majority of this archaeology, including the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), Civil Works Administration (CWA), Works Progress Administration/Work Projects Administration (WPA), and National Youth Administration (NYA)
Gregory Lattanzi (New Jersey State Museum) followed with ‘New Jersey’s First Stimulus Package: The Indian Site Survey 1936 to 1941’. These investigations were supervised by Dorothy Cross, who was probably the most prominent, and the longest serving, of the few female archaeologists in charge of New Deal archaeology in the U.S

Summary

Introduction

An edited volume on this New Deal archaeology session is planned, with expected publication by the University of Alabama Press in late 2011, or more likely, in early 2012 – in time for the Biennial Gordon Willey Symposium to be held as part of the SAAs in Memphis, Tennessee. The New Deal and American Archaeology’, I stressed how archaeologists across the nation took advantage of virtual armies of relief workers to move tons of soil and uncover thousands of archaeological sites, ranging in size from ephemeral hunter-gatherer camps to large villages and major mound complexes.

Results

Conclusion