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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 climate change and human response, exploring the development of cultural complexity in Eastern North America, maintaining and improving the nation's Cultural Resource management (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] and a co-director, with Joshua J. Wells, Eric C, Kansa, and Sarah Whitcher Kansa, of the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA)[2]
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.[1] 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.[citation needed]
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 under the direction of Martha Rolingson, and on the Zebree Homestead site, an early Mississippian period village that was 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.[2] 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.[citation needed]
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.[2] 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).[3] and of the Fort Polk CRM program.[4] 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. 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.[5] 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, for many years they have held a barbecue for researchers working at the nearby Topper archaeological site, an event that drew leading paleontologists, archeologists and anthropologists from around the country.[3] The home also is known for its atlatl practice range in the yard.[citation needed]
Anderson was born in St. Louis, MO in 1949, but he spent his childhood and teenage years in various locations including in the northeast, midwest, and southeast, graduating from high school in Milledgeville, GA in 1967. Anderson received his BA in anthropology from Case Western Reserve University in 1972. He received his master's degree in anthropology in 1979 from the University of Arkansas, and he received his PhD from the University of Michigan with a dissertation on Political Change in Chiefdom Societies: Cycling in the Late Prehistoric Southeastern United States in 1990. Anderson has conducted field work and led field projects in many locations in the Eastern United States, as well as projects in the southwest and the Caribbean. His work is documented in over 200 publications, including some 40 technical monographs, and 7 books.[4]
Anderson has worked in many different jobs relating to archaeology. Currently (2009–present) he is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, where he was previously an associate professor from 2004 to 2009. He joined the University of Tennessee faculty after spending 15 years with the National Park Service, first with the Interagency Archaeological Services Division from 1988 to 1996 in Atlanta, and from 1996 to 2003 with the Southeast Archeological Center in Tallahassee Florida. Anderson also worked as a research assistant with the University of South Carolina (1974–1975), as a Survey Assistant with the Arkansas Archeological Survey (1975–1977), and as an archaeologist with Commonwealth Associates, Inc. (1977–1983), and later, after attending graduate school at the University of Michigan (1983–1986), as an archaeologist with Garrow and Associates, Inc. (1986–1988).[5]
Anderson has received a number of professional awards from his colleagues, including being elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2014, and receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Southeastern Archaeological Conference in 2018. Other recognitions include the Excellence in Cultural Resource Management Research Award from the Society for American Archaeology (1999), the Dissertation Prize from the Society for American Archaeology (1991), and the first C. B. Moore Award for Excellence in Southeastern Archaeological Studies by the Lower Mississippi Valley Survey/Southeastern Archaeological Conference (1990). In 2006 he was elected President-elect of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference and served as President of that organization from 2008 to 2010. He has served as president of the South Carolina Council of Professional Archaeologists (1992–1993), The Tennessee Council for Professional Archaeology (2006–2007), and the Archaeological Society of South Carolina (1998–1999), and as an officer or board member in a number of state, regional, and national professional organizations.[6]
Anderson has led or participated in numerous field or analysis projects, including at the Winn Canyon site, New Mexico (1972); the Cal Smoak site, South Carolina (1973–1974);[6] the Zebree Homestead and Toltec Mounds Archeological State Park sites, Arkansas (1975–1977); at several sites along Congaree Creek in South Carolina (1974–1978); at the Mattassee Lake sites, South Carolina (1979);[7] at Rucker's Bottom and several other sites in the Richard B. Russell Multiple Resource Area area, Georgia and South Carolina (1980–1988);[8][9] in the L'Anguille River basin, Arkansas (1987);[10] at Fort Polk, Louisiana (1987–2003),[11][12] at Fort Pulaski, Georgia (1990); on Water Island, U.S. Virgin Islands (1991–2000);[13] at the Shiloh Indian Mounds with John E. Cornelison, Jr., Shiloh National Military Park (1999–2004); on the Francis Marion National Forest, South Carolina (1980–present);[14] along the Cumberland River near Nashville, Tennessee (2009–2012); and at the Topper site in Allendale County, South Carolina (2015-2017) where the research focus was on the dense late precontact occupations.
Anderson has helped develop models of Early Archaic settlement in the Southeast involving mobility and interaction at the band and macroband scale (with Glen Hanson)).;[15] Paleoindian colonization scenarios in the Americas, including the idea of 'staging areas' where early populations concentrated and from which they later radiated out over the surrounding region;[16] least cost movement pathways for initial colonizing populations in the Americas (with Chris Gillam);[17] and the causes of late prehistoric chiefly cycling behavior, the emergence and collapse of complex chiefdoms against a regional background of simple chiefdoms,[18] a concept initially noted by Marshall Sahlins[19] and elaborated upon by Henry T. Wright. Anderson has also examined global climate change including projected sea level rise and its impacts on prehistoric and early historic cultures in the Southeast and beyond;[20][21] and has helped prepare edited volumes synthesizing research on the Paleoindian and Early Archaic,[22] Middle Archaic,[23] and Woodland[24] periods in the southeastern United States.
