Shock and Awe: An Insider's View of the "Stanford Phenomenon"

Summary

In the early 1970s Clifford Evans created a "Paleoindian Program" at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Clovis was well-established in the literature, but its origins and antecedents were mysterious. Dennis Stanford had just received his PhD on Thule culture studies in Barrow, Alaska, but his real love was Paleoindians. After arriving at the SI he picked up the mantle of the Institution’s pioneering Paleoindian researcher, Frank Roberts, and instituted large-scale projects at Jones-Miller, Dutton-Selby, and other sites. Decades of federal funding provided resources for long-term research. Year-after-year, his papers, reports, and lectures (many to amateur and popular audiences) generated solid data and tested intriguing and sometimes highly controversial hypotheses. He served as chair of the Anthropology Department, trained students, and built a Paleoindian collection that became a national resource and attracted worldwide attention. This paper presents an insider’s forty-year perspective of the "Stanford Phenomenon"—how it changed Smithsonian science, challenged his colleagues, and brought public awareness to America’s first peoples.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 18696