Name Patty Watson | Education University of Chicago | |
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Books Explanation in Archeology: An Explicitly Scientific Approach Awards Gold Medal of the Archaeological Institute of America People also search for Steven A. LeBlanc, Richard Watson, Charles Redman | ||
Patty Jo Watson (born 1932) is an American archaeologist renowned for her work on Pre-Columbian Native Americans, especially in the Mammoth Cave region of Kentucky. She is now Distinguished University Professor Emerita, Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis. Until her retirement in 2004, she was the Edward Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor of Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis.
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Education
Watson earned her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1959. While attending the University of Chicago, she studied under Robert Braidwood.
Career
Watson devoted much of her early career to the archaeological study of the Ancient Near East. Her husband Richard A. Watson convinced her to change her focus from Near Eastern archaeology to work in North America.
Watson is a proponent of processual archaeology and has contributed greatly to that approach.
In addition, Watson has been instrumental in applying ethnography to the archaeological record. In the 1960s in Mammoth Cave, she introduced the practice of performing recreations of ancient lifeways as a method of filling in gaps from incomplete archaeological data. "She has contributed centrally to techniques for recovering carbonized plant remains from archaeological deposits and to understanding the independent origin of pre-maize agriculture in pre-Columbian eastern North America." Her work on the diet of Native Americans who lived in Mammoth Cave has included examining the intestines of bodies found in the cave and has been notably interdisciplinary in scope.
Accolades
In 1988, Watson was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In its November 2002 issue, Discover included Watson among "The 50 Most Important Women in Science." The article credited Watson with "establishing the best qualitative and quantitative data for an early agricultural complex in North America" and with helping to "introduce the scientific method into archaeological studies." Watson received the Gold Medal Award for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement in 1999 from the Archaeological Institute of America.