"Anthropology at Chicago" by George W. Stocking, Jr.

Case 12: Rediscovering Illinois

Never dogmatic in insisting on his own conception of the discipline, Cole seems to have encouraged the social anthropological mutation at Chicago. He continued, however, to push archaeological work in Illinois, which during the 1930s accounted for a third or more of the departmental research budget. The emphasis in the early years was on surveying potential sites for intensive work. The "Pictorial Survey of the Mississippi Valley" brought together photographic materials from sites all over the region to provide a basis for systematic comparative study. More intensive work was carried on during several field seasons in Fulton County, from which Cole and his archaeological aide-de-camp, Thorne Deuel, published Rediscovering Illinois in 1937. Basing their interpretation on the "Midwest Taxonomic System' proposed by W. C. McKern at a conference at Chicago in 1932, they differentiated two "cultural patterns" in the Mississippi drainage: the Woodland and the Mississippi.

Although such monographs had little appeal to non-academic readers, Cole's archaeology was oriented outward from the University. His representation of Grant Park as a potential archaeological site at the Century of Progress comes from a scrapbook full of press notices. His appeal to Stirling Morton to support a "Foundation for American Archaeology," although unsuccessful, reflects his continuing efforts to involve members of the Chicago business community - who at one point were organized into a "Catfish Clan" for fish fries on site visits in southern Illinois.

In 1934 Cole succeeded in purchasing 302 acres on the Ohio River for the University, and for the next few years the archaeological work of the Department focused on the Kincaid site. Following a pattern established before 1930, Cole used Kincaid as a training school for students from various institutions, who suffered chiggers, an intestinal trouble jokingly called "The Black Death," and even malaria while learning the careful digging methods which became the hallmark of Chicago archaeology in this period. Cole's own role tended to be organizational and advisory. From Deuel and a series of advanced graduate student camp supervisors he received weekly reports on the progress of the work. At critical points he organized site conferences or invited an outside expert to take charge of a field season. The culminating season was the summer of 1941 when Cole overcame deeply rooted Republican scruples to take advantage of WPA labor, which was widely employed in American archaeology in the late 1930s.

Cole approached archaeology in the "direct historical" terms characteristic of this period. One of his projects at Chicago was the Committee on Ethnohistory, which filmed thousands of pages of early American historical documents in order to locate sites for archaeological investigation and thus bridge the gap between the prehistoric cultural record and the ethnographic present. At the same time, he was also receptive to the needs of methodological advance in dating techniques and intra- and inter-site classification. He brought Florence Hawley from Arizona as Research Associate to work on dendrochronological problems in the departmental laboratories at the Lorado Taft Studio and encouraged his student Kenneth Orr to make a statistical analysis of pottery fragments to reveal artifact change at Kincaid. Cole's main contribution, however, was the organization of midwestern archaeology and the training of most of its leading students. Appropriately, the Kincaid volume, which finally appeared in 1951, was a cooperative effort. The contributors to Cole's Festschrift the following year included most of the major contributors to The Archaeology of the Northeastern United States.

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