Work Relief Archeology: How the New Deal Built American Archeology

Civilian Conservation Corps archeology at Ocmulgee. NPS photo.

To fight the effects of the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt set up work relief programmes that hired jobless Americans to build and maintain infrastructure across the country. From 1933 they gave work to thousands, and in the decade that followed, archeology grew quickly in both practice and public visibility.

The programmes

Among the most successful were the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Founded in 1935, the WPA employed more than 8.5 million people over eight years, on projects in nearly every county, many of them archeological. The WPA and CCC hired both trained archeologists and untrained workers to excavate, curate and research sites such as Irene Mound in Georgia, Catoctin Mountain Park, Dinosaur National Monument and Big Bend National Park.

What it changed

The public came to know excavation and to value archeology as a science, and the projects trained a new generation of archeologists. Many NPS archeologists of the early and mid-twentieth century, among them Louis Caywood, John Cotter and Arthur R. Kelly, came up through work relief, and archeologists had more resources than ever before. Gordon R. Willey, who worked at Macon, Georgia, and later taught at Harvard, remembered the scale: in 1936, at the depth of the Depression, Kelly had several hundred men with picks, shovels and trowels. The work mattered to the crews too. At Irene Mound, where the crew was almost entirely African American women, Hattie Coleman's granddaughter believes Coleman valued the work as the most intellectually stimulating of her adult life.

Its legacy in the parks

Visitors can still see the results at Jamestown, Ocmulgee National Monument and Rocky Mountain National Park. Relief workers dug miles of trenches, uncovered Native American sites, built park infrastructure and ran stratigraphic surveys. At Ocmulgee alone, hundreds excavated, catalogued and recorded the mounds and other sites, and found Georgia's first Clovis point.

The NPS Southeast Archeological Center, born of Depression-era relief work, still helps parks across the Southeast uncover, conserve, interpret and preserve archeological materials. The relief programmes ended with World War II, but they remain one of the most formative chapters in the history of American archeology and of the Park Service.

Further reading

• Bernard K. Means, ed., Shovel Ready: Archaeology and Roosevelt's New Deal for America (University of Alabama Press, 2013)
• Thomas D. Thiessen, Emergency Archeology in the Missouri River Basin (1999)
• Edwin A. Lyon, A New Deal for Southeastern Archaeology (1996)
• John C. Paige, The Civilian Conservation Corps and the National Park Service, 1933–1942: An Administrative History (1985)
• Lary M. Dilsaver, ed., America's National Park System: The Critical Documents, chapter 3, "The New Deal Years" (1994)

Sources

• National Park Service, "Work Relief Archeology." https://www.nps.gov/articles/work-relief-archeology.htm
• Corrected: "Federal Emergency Relief Agency" to "Administration", and "Dinosaur National Park" to "Dinosaur National Monument".
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.