Supporting Practical Inquiry: The Past, Present, and Future Contributions of Thomas Dye

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Supporting Practical Inquiry: The Past, Present, and Future Contributions of Thomas Dye" at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Across five decades, Thomas Dye has made substantial contributions to Hawaiian, Oceanic, and global archaeology in cultural resource management (CRM) and academic archaeology. Tom’s research contributions have occurred throughout his varied career, providing a valuable model for archaeologists to contribute to the field from multiple positions: as an archaeologist at the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Honolulu, an instructor at Hawai‘i Pacific University and the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Historic Preservation Officer for the Republic of the Marshall Islands, as the O‘ahu Island archaeologist for the Hawai‘i State Historic Preservation Division, as a project director at a CRM firm, and as an owner and principal investigator of his own CRM company. He is best known for his more recent work building empirically grounded chronologies using Bayesian statistics and elements of graph theory. However, of equal importance has been his bottom-up, archaeologically informed analyses of social processes that have complemented and calibrated more frequent top-down approaches, as well as his championing of open science. This symposium celebrates Tom’s contributions to archaeology, from his role in transforming how archaeologists in Oceania think about chronology to his contributions highlighting how the daily lives of individuals can provide important information on social process.