Professions

David G. Anderson (born c.1952) 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).

Upon graduation with a BA in 1972, Anderson volunteered on archaeological field projects in southwestern New Mexico for several months. Continuing with voluneteer 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 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.

Source: Wikipedia