Twenty-Five Years of Eastern Archaeology

Archaeological research in the Eastern United States is reviewed from the period of large-scale excavations sponsored by federal relief agencies to the present period of trend toward interdisciplinary approaches. An early interest was the identification of the archaeological ancestors of historically and ethnographically known tribes. The need for objective and descriptive classifications led to the development of the McKern or Midwestern Taxonomic Method. Recent developments include the use of functional and evolutionary concepts experimentation with statistics to validate analytical and classificatory techniques, discovery of stratigraphic evidence and the perfection of seriational techniques, emphasis on the value of geological and biological data and the combination of these with archaeological information to produce an ecological approach, and attempts at broad culture-historical synthesis. The introduction of radiocarbon dating, which exposed the extremely conservative time estimates of Eastern archaeologists by greatly lengthening the chronologies, is seen as the major contribution of the past 25 years.