Excavate!: January 2008

Dr. David Anderson will discuss “First Peopling to Monumental Architecture in Eastern North America” in Chan Auditorium at 7:30 PM on 4 February 2008. Our first speaker's talk will build upon and possibly challenge the suggestions that Dr. James Adovasio made in his engaging spring 2007 lecture on Paleolithic culture and the peopling of the Americas. For his University of Michigan PhD dissertation, "Political Change in Chiefdom Societies: Cycling in the Late Prehistoric Southeastern United States," Dr. Anderson received national recognition by winning the Society for American Archaeology's (SAA) prestigious Dissertation Prize. The SAA honored Dr. Anderson again in 1997 and 1999 with its Presidential Recognition Award and its Excellence in Cultural Resource Management Research Award. After a fascinating career with the National Park Service, which had Anderson working from the Caribbean to New Mexico to Shiloh, TN, he joined the anthropology faculty at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where he has been teaching since 2004. The University of Alabama Press has published four of his last five books. His most recent tome, co-authored with K. Maasch and D. Sandsweiss, explores a timely issue that also had implications for past cultures: Climate Change and Cultural Dynamics: A Global Perspective on Mid-Holocene Transitions.