Abstract
A DETERMINATION to limit public expenditure and opposition to the President in the United States of America have recently eliminated most of the intellectual activities which had been subsidized out of Federal funds in the desire to stimulate prosperity by State aid. Archæological investigations in the field, however, so long as they worked within the States, have survived attack owing to the fact that they provide occupation for a considerable number of the unemployed. This consideration does not affect expeditions working abroad and in the Old World, and these have had to be curtailed on the ground of economy. Nearly one hundred archæological expeditions, it is reported by Science Service of Washington, D.C., have taken the field in the course of the present summer; and of these, thirty-two in twenty-two States are financed as part of the W.P.A. programme, the Government supplying the labour—2,500 men and women in all—for excavation work under the direction of representatives of museums, universities and scientific institutions sponsoring the respective expeditions. Two investigations in particular have been made possible by the advantageous conditions. Of these, one is a combined effort on the part of the Universities of Montana, Wyoming, and other of the south-western States to find evidence of the line of advance of the earliest immigrants into America through the Siberia-Alaska gateway towards the south-west. The other will make a rapid and intensive examination of the mounds and other relics of early occupation in the vast region in the States of Tennessee, Alabama and Texas, which is marked for inundation when the dams of the Tennessee Scheme of water supply are built. It is hoped that it may be possible to trace the relation of the cultures of the Mississippi Valley to those of the south before it is too late, and the evidence disappears for ever.
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Archæological Explorations in the United States. Nature 144, 473 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/144473c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/144473c0