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When I ¤rst became involved in archaeology in 1959, the expenditures for all archaeology in Kentucky were probably somewhat less than $40,000, mainly for university salaries. Now it is probably conservative to estimate that that ¤gure is somewhere between six and eight million dollars, due to changes in public policy. Unlike today, archaeology did not really exist in a very meaningful way at the end of the 1950s. Over the past forty years the practice of archaeology has become an increasingly diverse enterprise. No one could have foreseen this in 1959. Today only a small percentage of Kentucky archaeologists are employed in the academy, whereas in 1959 all were. Nineteen are listed in the Register of Professional Archaeologists . As many again are not. Those outside the academy hold a variety of jobs in public administration and the private sector. It may be surprising to some that the job descriptions of the many archaeologists in Kentucky do not state that they shall act like “traditional” archaeologists. We are fortunate that we have a recent summary of state archaeology (Lewis 1996). Yet, as important as it is, it does not do justice to the variety of archaeological enterprises that exist; archaeology has truly become a public service whose goal is not simply limited to the reconstruction of the past. But with Lewis’s summary in hand I have chosen here to focus on aspects of intellectual development that may not be obvious from its excellent coverage. I do this to counter a tendency to view archaeological history as paradigmatic, which is all too often seen as a blank check to ignore history altogether or mercilessly bowdlerize it like a young Binford skewering his teachers in his earlier writings. 14 Forty Years of Kentucky Archaeology or Incidents of Recent Archaeological History in a Border State A Review R. Berle Clay A Comment on the River Basin Program At the end of the 1950s Kentucky archaeology was the National Park Service River Basin Surveys Program. It produced capsule views of prehistory from scattered river valleys of the state and a large body of technical reports and published articles. Initially including surveys of the Barkley,Nolin,Rough, and Barren Reservoirs, it went on to Cave Run on the Licking, Fishtrap on the upper Cumberland, the Green and Red Rivers, and Paint and Blaine Creeks in eastern Kentucky. River Basin archaeology only ends in the 1980s with the Yatesville Reservoir in eastern Kentucky. Super¤cially it is dif¤cult to equate the products of these many years. Nowhere is this more evident than in the ¤nal monograph on the Paintsville Reservoir (Adovasio 1982), a product near the end of River Basin work. In more than one thousand pages of excruciating detail this monograph covers questions about material culture that was not collected in 1959 (chert debitage and archaebotanical materials). Realistically, however, there is no reason why they should be “equated.” River Basin archaeology proved to be a source of innovation. Work in Barkley Basin produced the ¤rst regional ceramic sequence (Clay 1963), which has had enduring impact (Clay 1979, 1997). Barren Reservoir produced the ¤rst signi¤cant dissection of a Mississippian platform mound (Hanson 1970). The Fishtrap Reservoir is memorable for the ¤rst real attempt in the state to deal with the structure of an archaeological community, the Woodside phase component of the Slone site (Dunnell et al. 1971; Hanson et al. 1971). Cave Run Reservoir marks an important milestone in the development of lithic studies (Blakeman 1971). Work in a projected Red River Reservoir included important archaeobotanical work (Cowan 1979) with later consequences (cf. Cowan et al. 1981). Finally, excavations in the Yatesville Reservoir documented an Early Woodland occupation for eastern Kentucky (Niquette and Kerr 1989). In retrospect, River Basin archaeology has been less a bad old brand of archaeology characteristic of a certain period than a bellwether of the changes in archaeology for forty years. Unfortunately, it will remain “salvage archaeology ” for all too many and somehow inferior to contemporaneous grantfunded archaeology. Trumpets and Small Change for the New Archaeology In the early 1960s we were on the brink of changes measured by greatly increased graduate training opportunities and the addition of peer-reviewed research funding in the form of National Science Foundation grants. Combined , these produced that ®owering known as the “New Archaeology.” I remember when Al Spaulding, then NSF director for archaeology, visited the Forty Years of Kentucky Archaeology 161 University of Kentucky in 1962 soliciting grant applications. This resulted in...

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