I came into archaeology because I had the great good fortune to spend a summer on a River Basin Projects field crew in Montana and Wyoming after my sophomore year. After a summer of surveying and digging in the back country, I knew I didn’t want to do anything else. Since then, archaeology has continued to fascinate me, presenting a never-ending series of research problems, new places to see, new people to meet. My specialties have come to be the archaeology and ethnohistory of the Great Plains of North America.

My current interests fall into several categories (the dates cited will link you with relevant publications). Ever since my dissertation work, I have been interested in long-distance contacts between groups. My work with the early historic exchange system on the Great Plains showed that inter-group exchanges on the Great Plains were part of an organized, bounded system symbolized by the calumet pipe and the Plains Indian sign language (1975a, 1977, 1978b, 1981). Elizabeth Faison, a recent graduate of our MA program, completed a thesis on a related topic --tobacco symbolism.

Work on the trade system eventually led to studying the trails along which people and goods moved (1986a, 1988d, 1990b), and this interest in turn led me an interest in expeditions of the early historic period. I have traced the route of the Mallet expedition of 1739 (1991, 1995b) and have discovered and am excavating a campsite of the Coronado expedition of 1541 (1997b, 1997c, 1998b). Former students Bob Blasing and Frank Gagne wrote theses on related topics.

A second interest of long standing has to do with the time frame called the Middle Ceramic (AD 1000-1400) on the Great Plains. I have written extensively on the Nebraska (1978a, 1979b, 1989), St. Helena (1988a, 1988b, 1988c) and Solomon River phases (1999b), as well as more general works on the era (1978a, 1982a, 1987c, 1993). The 1988 volume on the St. Helena phase is composed of articles written by my students (and one colleague). Mark Latham’s recent MA thesis is an example of the kinds of contribution that graduate students can make to our understanding of this era of plains prehistory.

A third interest might be labeled archaeological science. I had been an astronomy student before that life-altering summer doing archaeology in the northwestern plains, and I did eventually earn a minor in mathematics. As a result, a familiarity with natural science, with mathematical models and with instrumentation has informed some of my work. In particular, I have paid close attention to radiocarbon dating, the most commonly used (and abused) dating system available to archaeologists (1983c, 1983d, 1994b, 1997a). A second persistent interest in archaeological science has been in the kinds of information derived from human skeletal remains that can be used to construct an understanding of past societies (1981b, 1983b, 1986c, 1990a, 1994a). Still another scientifically-oriented research theme is the analysis of stone tools to obtain information about past societies (1987b). I am currently working with Michelle Peck on the re-analysis of a major site collection which we will co-author.

My other theoretical orientation may seem like a contradiction of the first. It is thoroughly humanistic in outlook, viewing human beings as purposeful, thinking individuals possessing culture but not totally possessed by it. Indeed, many of my publications that have a scientific flavor are critiques of the misuse or outright abuse of laboratory data and mathematical models (1983c, 1983d, 1988c, 1989). I see archaeology as a branch of cultural anthropology, and as a student of culture, I tend to favor non-deterministic and non-reductionist explanations. Archaeology with this slant has recently come to the fore as "cognitive archaeology" but my interest has been of long standing (1977, 1978b, 1981a, 1988a, 1994a). My current projects in this arena include a book with a former student on cultural landscapes and another on the symbolism of meteors and meteoric iron. Pam Eldridge recently completed a thesis under my direction on color and number symbolism in four Plains Indian cultures.

Finally, I do contract archaeology on a regular basis. This pays for summer field schools and provides our students with opportunities to gain field and laboratory experience. I share with the rest of the department the firm belief that a good MA program must provide hands-on experience to our students.