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The Making of the Haag/Quimby Tape Ann F. Ramenofsky, Fall 1999 Shortly after joining the faculty at Louisiana State University, I began to realize that LSU played a much bigger role in culture history and Works Progress Administration archaeology than was traditionally recognized by the professional community. I knew that Ford had received his undergraduate degree from LSU, that Ford and Fred Kniffen had worked together closely, that the Marksville excavation was signi¤cant in WPA history, and that Bill Haag had worked in the WPA with Major Webb. I did not know the role that George Quimby had played in the Louisiana WPA organization or that the WPA laboratory was housed on the LSU campus for a period of time. Moreover, knowing something of the structure of WPA history in Louisiana and beyond was quite different from knowing the stories. The stories created a rich and unique texture of the period. The longer I was at LSU, the more stories I heard, and the more important capturing those stories became. Bringing the Past Alive: A Conversation with Bill Haag and George Quimby was my effort to provide an oral history of WPA archaeology and to share the richness of the period with the generations who had not been there. The project was made possible by a grant from the Louisiana Endowment of the Humanities, 89-887-15, and by the Department of Geography and Anthropology at LSU. Editors’ note: The following excerpts from Ann Ramenofsky’s interview with William Haag and George Quimby in 1989 are taken from a fourteenthousand -word transcription prepared by Shannon Tushingham. 1 Excerpts from “Bringing the Past Alive” Interviews with William Haag and George Quimby William Haag, George Quimby, and Ann F. Ramenofsky Introduction Ann F. Ramenofsky Despite the poverty that permeated America in the 1930s, it was a time of great archaeological creativity throughout the Southeast. Federal programs in Southeastern archaeology (what Ed Lyon has called New Deal archaeology) put hundreds of people to work, resulting in the excavation of more than three hundred sites. George Quimby was director of the WPA laboratories in Louisiana from 1939 to 1941. The laboratory was ¤rst located in New Orleans; it was moved to the geology building at LSU in 1939. William Haag began his archaeological career as ¤eld supervisor in the Tennessee Valley Authority projects in 1934. In 1937 he became curator of anthropology at the University of Kentucky. After World War II, Bill became Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Mississippi. He joined the geography and anthropology faculty at LSU in 1953. Haag/Quimby Interview Editor’s note: Dialogue preceded by “R” is the interviewer and producer, Ann F. Ramenofsky; “H” and “Q” are the discussants. R: Bill, would you like to talk about how you got into archaeology and what was going on at Kentucky once you got involved in curation, museum work, and so forth? H: The so forth is what I know most about. It became apparent that to have a successful TVA archeological program, they had to have a lot of archaeologists . There were not a lot of archaeologists. Thus, any of us that had museum experience [were hired]. I labored under that exalted title of Curator of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky. Yet what that mostly meant was arranging artifacts in cases more than any real experience. But I had worked with Major Webb and W. D. Funkhouser in rock shelters in the eastern part of Kentucky , essentially as a way to pass the summer. Thus it was that anyone who had a minimum amount of experience [was hired]. But I must confess that I learned my archaeology in Tennessee, in the Wheeler Basin and Pickwick Basin [where] there were hundreds of archaeological sites. Big shell middens and so on. But we could touch only a minimum number of those. A very accurate survey was made of those sites, so that when Pickwick Dam is completely covered under 180 feet of silt, they can pinpoint that archaeological site. They will be mining archaeological sites in all probability . George, how did you really get sucked into the program? 4 Haag, Quimby, and Ramenofsky Q: When I entered the University of Michigan. Grif¤n has written of his surprise that I passed physical education; I also passed the course in hygiene. And on that basis, I was admitted to the graduate school. I majored in anthropology because it was one of the ¤rst things in the catalog...

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