Seen striding through the scattered pi??n of the New Mexico countryside, David Hurst Thomas more closely resembles a contented rancher than a leading American archaeologist. Hand raised to shield his eyes from the morning sun, his gaze scans the surroundings as if looking for lost cattle or appraising the skies for rain. But the objects of his scrutiny on this July morning are cultural phenomena rather than works of nature, and the grassy mounds that slope away in every direction are the remains of an abandoned Native American village that in AD 1600 may have housed hundreds of people. In the background are the clouds of dust, the piles of fresh dirt, and the T'shirt-clad work crews that are hallmarks of an archaeological excavation in progress. As he studies the ruins of Pueblo San Marcos in the summer of 1999, Thomas is appraising the latest phase of an ambitious program to integrate field archaeology and documentary history into the study of the Spanish Borderlands. A few months later, in New York, where Thomas is the curator of North American archaeology at the American Museum of Natural History, the practical questions of fieldwork have given way to the less tractable issue of the relationship between history and archaeology. In the United States the two are very much separate disciplines, with their own traditions and jealously guarded prerogatives. In popular conception, archaeologists study Pre-Columbian Native America, while historians examine the colonizers of the subsequent age. Archaeologists base their interpretations on studies of material remains, and historians rely on documentary sources. The differ ences in perspective are profound, despite a mutual concern with the interpretation of the past. Traditionally, where archaeology and history have come together, such as in the creation of Colonial Williamsburg, archaeologists have functioned as technical experts, providing a reconstructed stage on which historical scenes can be enacted. In recent decades, however, scholars from different disciplines and institutions have built intellectual bridges between history and archaeology, a movement in which Thomas is in the vanguard. He was raised in the San Francisco Bay area, and was drawn to archaeology from his earliest years. In California, the most prominent monuments of the past are the colonial missions, and Thomas remembers traveling up and down California with his family to visit them all. Continued interest in archaeology derailed a planned pre med curriculum at the University of California, Davis, but Thomas applied his mathematical and scientific acumen to his new career. His first job as an archaeologist was on a historic-period excavation in Old Sacramento. Although he subsequendy moved on to prehistoric sites in the American West, in the process earning a reputation for rigorous, quantitative methods, Thomas kept track of ongoing research in the California missions. Shortly after he moved to New York in 1974, the opportunity to begin his own borderlands project presented itself. Instead of California, however, the new initiative was set in the Southeast, where the American Museum of Natural History was invited to run a research program on St. Catherine's Island off the Georgia coast. The work, initially begun as a study of the prehistoric cultures of the region, eventually shifted focus towards solving one of the abiding mysteries of Spanish colonial history in the Southeast: the location of Santa Catalina de Guale, one of the most prominent coastal settlements of the seventeenth century. Scholars were in general agreement that the mission had been on St. Catherine's Island, but no one knew exacdy where, nor what it would have looked like. Without any evident ruins, the location of the mission was a mystery. At first, the issue was largely technical: finding the missing mission. In this effort Thomas was able to draw on his considerable experience in archaeological surveying and conducted an island-wide sampling program. This strategy isolated a single, hundred-meter
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Apr 9, 2003
Christopher M Stojanowski 
Open Access
