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Précis Charles H. McNutt This volume has grown from seeds planted by two of my past graduate students, Jane Hill and Shannon Tushingham, who wished to organize a session at the Southeastern Archaeological Conference in my honor, featuring senior scholars giving their personal views of the history of Southeastern archaeology . I made some of the initial contacts; responses were more than anyone could hope for—a real geriatric happening. Hill and Tushingham followed up in all phases of organization and also laid the groundwork for publication of our efforts by the University of Alabama Press. I am suf¤ciently honored to be a participant in the project. As you all know, one of our most highly respected and fondly regarded contributors , Roger Saucier, was not able to present his paper at SEAC in person. It is our good fortune that Roger had completed his critical contribution to our volume before his untimely death. My colleague Charles Faulkner discusses the history of archaeology in Tennessee . This leaves me free to add a brief personal note told, it is hoped, against a background of more than three decades of Southeastern archaeology. My ¤rst association with Southeastern archaeology came when I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan. I accompanied Jimmy Grif¤n and Al Spaulding to Poverty Point in 1955, I think, where we joined such other notables as William Haag, Junius Bird, George Quimby, Clarence Webb, Stu Neitzel, and Robert Greengo to discuss the puzzle of Poverty Point with Jim Ford. The Michigan contingent returned by way of Nodena Plantation, where I met the Hampsons; from there we went to see Cahokia, which I refused to believe was a mound. In 1957 Grif¤n and Spaulding also took me to the fourteenth SEAC in Macon, Georgia. In those days, professors took graduate students to sites and went out of their way to introduce them to other professionals. As auspicious as this was, I was an ingrate. I had gotten my master’s degree in the Southwest and could not understand why people would dig among roots, mud, poison ivy, mosquitoes, and chiggers. I still don’t really understand it. After passing my preliminary doctoral exams and digging my “dissertation site”—in the Southwest—I went to work for Robert Stephenson in 1957 at the River Basin Surveys located in Lincoln, Nebraska. My position was absolutely ideal—an excellent boss, stimulating colleagues, no publish-or-perish pressure, incredible research opportunities, a lab such as only Bob Stephenson could organize , and a very open intellectual atmosphere. Inexplicably, I decided to leave Lincoln in late 1959 and enter academia. In those days, you could do this easily; it was a seller’s market, unlike today. I ended up at the University of Tennessee, with some encouragement from Jimmy Grif¤n. Lewis and Kneberg had been at Tennessee since the 1930s and would soon retire; they needed a successor. I went to Knoxville, did a great job teaching, conducted and published excellent research in Melton Hill Reservoir, and gave resounding speeches to the public. But for some reason I was not regarded as a desirable successor. I still don’t know what went wrong. Lewis was followed by Ted Guthe as Chairman, and when I found that Guthe somehow feared the distant wrath of Madeline, I resigned. It was still a seller’s market in the spring of 1962. My wife was not enthusiastic about my prideful behavior. After two years’ R and R with Bob Euler at Northern Arizona University, I returned to Tennessee in 1964, this time to Memphis State University. Mindful Figure 0.1. Charles H. McNutt (playing the banjo) and Bill Dunson at Sully Field Camp, South Dakota, 1958. (Courtesy of Robert W. Neuman) x Charles H. McNutt that my career had consisted of disjointed two-year stints in Lincoln, Knoxville , and Flagstaff, I resolved to become more sedentary. I did; I am still here. In Memphis, the only other person on the staff was Charles Nash, who was teaching a course in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and also directing activities at the nascent Chucalissa museum. The program at Memphis State University, now unfortunately named The University of Memphis, has grown since that time from an undergraduate specialization in anthropology to an “applied” Master of Arts program that has graduated well over one hundred M.A.s in archaeology, urban, and medical tracks. Our archaeology graduates have been very successful in ¤nding positions with cultural resource...
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