Author: Ryan Wheeler

This award supports research at the Robert S. Peabody Institute of Archaeology using the collections of the museum. The endowment was named in honor of Dr. Linda S. Cordell, a distinguished archaeologist, specializing in the American Southwest.

History

Linda S. Cordell (1943-2013) was Professor Emerita at the University of Colorado Boulder, a Senior Scholar at the School for Advanced Research on the Human Experience, in Santa Fe, external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, and the former director of the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History, Boulder. A member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she received the A. V. Kidder medal for eminence in American Archaeology from the American Anthropological Association, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for American Archaeology. She was a dedicated and long-time member of the Peabody Advisory Committee and is greatly missed by her colleagues at the museum. Linda’s publications on the archaeology of the Southwest are well-known to scholars and the general public.

Linda’s commitment to scholarship and research was the catalyst for the creation of an endowed award in her memory at the Peabody Institute.

Criteria

Professionals in archaeology, anthropology, and allied social, natural and physical sciences. PhD candidates, junior faculty at colleges and universities, and Native American scholars are encouraged to apply.

Application Information

Applications will include: 1) completed application form; 2) one letter of recommendation from faculty advisor (if Ph.D. candidate), academic department chair (if junior faculty), or professional reference; 3) current curriculum vita. The Linda S. Cordell Memorial Research Award application is available from Ryan Wheeler. Applications will be reviewed and ranked by the Linda S. Cordell Memorial Research Award sub-committee, with awards announced annually in the spring. Any destructive sampling or analysis will require approval from Peabody Collections Oversight Committee. Recipients may be invited to share their research with students and faculty at Phillips Academy. Awards support research at the Robert S. Peabody Institute of Archaeology using the collections of the museum.

Applications should be submitted to the Director, Robert S. Peabody Institute by September 1 or April 1. Submissions, including letters of recommendation, should be submitted by e-mail. Award recipients will be selected and notified in spring. The Award may be used anytime during the twelve month period following notification.

Support the Endowment

To make a gift in support of the Linda S. Cordell Memorial Research Award please contact Ryan Wheeler or visit our online giving page.

Recipients

2014

University of Connecticut PhD candidate Zac Singer was the first recipient of the Linda S. Cordell Memorial Research Award, which supported his reanalysis of the Neponset site collection, specifically focusing on the middle Paleoindian (circa 10,000 to 11,000 years ago) assemblage from the site. Singer will use the data to complement his excavation and analysis of a Paleoindian site on the Mashantucket Pequot Reservation in southeastern Connecticut. This research will expand understanding of Paleoindian life in the Northeast, including study of lithic sources and stone tool manufacture; the work also will document a significant but little-studied Peabody Museum collection.

2015

Jessica Watson is a PhD candidate at University at Albany-SUNY. Her research involves analysis of animal bones from the Frisby-Butler and Hornblower II sites on Martha’s Vineyard. These collections were donated to the Peabody in 2012 by Jim Richardson and represent excavations made in 1982 with the late archaeologist Jim Peterson. Jessica says her dissertation research will use “faunal assemblages from sites in the Northeastern U.S. … (to) examine human-environmental interactions by identifying changes in animal populations during early European colonization (ca. 1600-1700).” Her dissertation is tentatively titled Ecological Effects of Colonization on Mammals and Birds along the Northeastern Atlantic Coast.

Adam King is Research Associate Professor at the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of South Carolina. His Cordell project focuses on Warren Moorehead’s 1925-1927 excavations at the Etowah site village near Cartersville, Georgia. King says, “my goal is to use the artifacts and documents produced to help evaluate the … ideas about the distribution of village areas at the site and the possibility that the Late Wilbanks village was burned.” He plans to examine pottery collections from the site and collect carbon samples for radiocarbon dating. Adam’s  dissertation on the Etowah site was published as Etowah: The Political History of a Chiefdom Capital (2003) and his research was instrumental in NAGPRA determinations of affiliation made by the Peabody in the 1990s.

2016

Dave Thulman is an Assistant Professorial Lecturer at George Washington University where he teaches courses on human rights and ethics, cultural property, the archaeology of North America, and the peopling of the Americas.  He received the Linda S. Cordell Memorial Research Award to support his ongoing documentation of Paleoindian and Early Archaic period artifacts. Dave has already collected over 5000 early stone tool images, mainly from the Southeast, and new data from the Peabody’s collections will be used in several shape analyses, particularly looking at shape differences and assessing the degree of regional variation. He notes that current shape analyses of Paleoindian tools has been done on small datasets and that his “intent is to analyze hundreds of Paleoindian and Early Archaic artifacts to produce robust statistical inferences about temporal and spatial group relationships.” Dave received his PhD in 2006 from Florida State University in Tallahassee and serves as president of the non-profit Archaeological Research Cooperative, Inc. (ARCOOP).

Contributed by Ryan Wheeler

The Peabody Museum received a grant of $100,000 from the Oak River Foundation of Peoria, Ill., to support work pertaining to the intellectual and physical control of the museum’s collections.

The first year of funding will support the work of a museum archivist who will organize the Peabody archives, which contain significant materials related to work by Warren Moorehead, Doug Byers, Fred Johnson, Scotty MacNeish, and others. This project will facilitate digitization of archival collections through our partnership with the Boston Public Library’s Digital Commonwealth, a statewide consortium of libraries, museums, archives, and historical societies from across Massachusetts. Researchers regularly use our archives, and this project will aid in locating materials and making collections more broadly available.

The second year of funding will support the process of cataloging the Peabody’s significant object collections related to Scotty MacNeish’s excavations in Mexico, Peru, and the American Southwest, as well as collections from the Northeast. We also hope to substantially increase the number of records in the museum’s database and include all cataloged artifacts in our online catalog, PastPerfect (http://peabody.pastperfect-online.com/40391cgi/mweb.exe?request=random).

The work supported by the Oak River Foundation is just a small part of the overall effort to increase physical and intellectual control of the Peabody’s collections. We hope this gift will inspire others to support work to better catalog, document, and make accessible the Peabody’s world-class collections of objects, photographs, and archival materials. If you would like to support this work, please contact me at 978-749-4493 or rwheeler@andover.edu.