David G Anderson

David G. Anderson (born 1949) is an archaeologist in the department of anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who specializes in Southeastern archaeology. His professional interests include exploring the development of cultural complexity in Eastern North America, maintaining and improving the nation’s CRM program, teaching and writing about archaeology, and developing technical and popular syntheses of archaeological research. He is the project director of the on-line Paleoindian Database of the Americas (PIDBA).[1]

Contents

• Background
• Employment history
• Awards and honors
• Key excavations
• Research Emphases
• Selected books and monographs
• Selected papers
• References

The majority of Anderson’s career has been involved in Cultural Resources Management (CRM) archaeology. Graduating from high school in Milledgeville, Georgia, he went to Case Western Reserve University for his undergraduate education. He did not have an interest in anthropology initially, but switched to it after taking classes in physics, biology, and classics. The change was inspired by an introductory anthropology course he took during his sophomore year. Anthropology intrigued Anderson because it focused on major questions of human existence, such as why people fought wars, practice religion, or organized themselves the way they do in groups and cultures. The major historical figures of the field of anthropology were not afraid to tackle big questions or to challenge accepted stereotypes about race or culture, and this appealed to Anderson’s 1960s-era idealism. Because of his own experience, Anderson feels that well-taught introductory courses in archaeology or anthropology can be crucial in recruiting new members to the profession.

Upon graduation with a BA in 1972, Anderson volunteered on archaeological field projects in southwestern New Mexico for several months. Continuing with volunteer work over the next two years, in 1974, Anderson began his first full-time job in archaeology at the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology (SCIAA) in a research assistant’s position largely funded by CRM work. At SCIAA his mentors included Robert L. Stephenson, Leland Ferguson; Albert Goodyear, and Stanley A. South. He subsequently received an assistantship with the Arkansas Archaeological Survey that enabled him to complete an M.A. in anthropology at the University of Arkansas. While at Arkansas, Anderson worked with materials from the Toltec Mounds Archeological State Park in central Arkansas, and on the Zebree Homestead site, an early Mississippian period village that was literally being draglined away during the final 1976 field season as a part of a Corps of Engineers channelization project. The research at Zebree, a project directed by Dan Morse and Phyllis Morse, explored the emergence of Mississippian culture in this part of the Mississippi Valley. Anderson recognized very early in his career that CRM offered exciting research opportunities; occasionally with massive levels of funding, and that an M.A. was sufficient for a person to direct such projects. The way to continue to have these opportunities, he recognized, was to conduct the best possible research and to write informative and interesting reports that touched on the lives of past peoples and not merely the description of artifacts and features, so that the funding agencies could see that their money was actually providing valuable information about past human behavior.

Upon the conclusion of the Zebree project in 1977, Anderson took a job for seven years with a CRM firm in Michigan, Commonwealth Associates, Inc. In this position, Anderson directed progressively larger survey and excavation projects in the southeast and southwest. In 1983 Anderson enrolled in the University of Michigan anthropology doctoral program, where he spent the next three years on campus taking courses. After his classwork was completed in 1986, Anderson took a job with another CRM company, Garrow and Associates, in Atlanta, Georgia. With Garrow and associates, Anderson directed a major survey project in northeast Arkansas, examining approximately 90 miles (140 km) of the L'Anguille River channel margin, and also wrote two major archaeological syntheses, of the Richard B. Russell Multiple Resource Area CRM program (with J. W. Joseph). and of the Fort Polk CRM program. In 1988 he joined the National Park Service where he worked until 2004. That same year he was awarded a dissertation fellowship from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Associated Universities’ Laboratory Graduate Participation Program. The DOE fellowship gave Anderson an office in the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site facility near Williston, South Carolina, the rural community where his family currently resides. Interestingly, in 1974 and 1975, while with SCIAA, he had participated in the initial archaeological survey of the 328-square-mile (850 km²) complex. In 1990, Anderson completed his dissertation, Political Change in Chiefdom Societies: Cycling in the Late Prehistoric Southeastern United States, that focused on chiefly cycling, how and why these kinds of societies emerge, expand, and collapse. The dissertation was also a synthesis of Mississippian archaeology in the Savannah River basin, with much of the data obtained from CRM work. It was published in 1994 as The Savannah River Chiefdoms: Political Change in the Late Prehistoric Southeast. Upon completion of his dissertation, Anderson returned to the National Park Service’s Technical Assistance and Partnerships Division. In 2004, Anderson joined the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee.

At the Andersons' restored plantation home in South Carolina, they are known for their annual Carnivores' Ball, which draws leading paleontologists, archeologists and anthropologists from around the country. The home also is known for its atlatl practice range in the yard.