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8.2. July 1973 Summer School Class under Cotter at the Athenaeum of Philadelphia. Site of the 1775–1835 Walnut Street Prison. Archaeology students from Cheltenham High School are being shown the site by Dr. Cotter. Photo courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. each of these three advances; and at the center of this building process was not Jamestown but Philadelphia. In 1957 Cotter returned to the city as a NPS regional archaeologist for the Northeast and took the geographical opportunity to reactivate his earlier graduate career (1935–37) at Penn as a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology. Within two years he had retaken class work, passed his doctoral exams, and turned in a version of his Jamestown report as his dissertation. He was granted the Ph.D. in 1959. By 1960 he was an established and recognized, if newly arrived, ¤gure in Americanist historical archaeology, and it was from the start of that decade that he used Philadelphia and its institutions (especially the NPS of¤ce, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University Museum) to solidify and expand the horizons of his newly adopted ¤eld. In a memorandum dated June 28, 1960, he started a long personal interaction with Anthony N. B. Garvan, the chairman of the newly established Department of American Civilization at Penn, as seen in the following memo (Cotter Papers): The Department of Anthropology has requested my VITAE and it has been suggested by Dr. Goodenough that you may wish to see a draft of a course on Historic Sites Archaeology. Included herewith is my Bibliography , in which I have not included items in press, such as a book review for William and Mary Quarterly and an article for Expedition, printed by the University Museum. John L. Cotter American Civilization 770 (“Problems and Methods of Historical American Archaeology”), ¤rst offered in the academic year 1960–61 and expanded three years later with the addition of a summer ¤eld component, is very likely the ¤rst class to carry the designation of “historical archaeology” in America. For just short of twenty years (1960–79), Cotter taught or helped to teach a series of lecture and ¤eld courses that explored Philadelphia as an archaeological site. He is fondly remembered by numbers of former students as a supportive and lifelong mentor (see quotes from former students Paul Huey, Gerry Wheeler Stone, and Betty Cosans-Zebooker in Schuyler 1999). He could nevertheless on occasion be a hard taskmaster (Cotter Papers): Letter to a Penn Student (August 18, 1967) Your examination and notes, although not of the ¤rst order, were conJohn L. Cotter and Historical Archaeology 161 siderable better than your ¤eld work. In brief, you are not disposed to become a ¤eld technician, and it is not upon what you did in the ¤eld that the grade is given. I have taken into account particularly the fact that you were in undergraduate status, and not in the same league with experienced graduate students who knew what to do to develop skill in a ¤eld enterprise. You do show an indication of analytical thinking, and can hopefully make something of archival and reference sources. If you get no more than an ability to set up a reasonable archaeological project if called upon to do so, in the future, you have earned your [grade]. But for heaven’s sake, recommend a competent archaeologist to do the work. Sincerely, John L. Cotter Across the 1960s, the instructors who taught the subject of historical archaeology were either unsecured adjunct faculty members (for example, Cotter at Penn or Arthur Woodward [1963–64] at Arizona) or standing faculty offering small, occasional graduate seminars or only incorporated historic archaeological examples into their general introductory courses. Cotter, as a visiting adjunct associate professor, re®ects the ¤rst attribute; but he also, in response to Tony Garvan (American Civilization) and the nature of Philadelphia as a fully historic eighteenth- and nineteenth-century site, offered an odd course that ironically in many aspects was a full decade ahead of its time. These unusual in®uences at Penn pushed Cotter equally away from his initial attempts to present historical archaeology as a universal ¤eld ranging across world history from the Classical Mediterranean to Ancient Egypt to Jamestown or as a simple extension of North American prehistory (contact-sites) directly into the core of the ¤eld—European (later African and Asian) colonial cultures and their internal evolution in the New World. Historic artifact categories (ceramics, glass, metal) gained...

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