Sand, Rivers, Glacial Lakes and the Prairie-Forest Border: A Doc Holliday Student Heads North

Summary

In this paper I link ongoing research along the eastern shore of Glacial Lake Agassiz (GLA) to Doc Holliday, the person who made it possible. Doc instilled in his students an interdisciplinary mind-set, and taught them to emphasize archaeological questions first and to consider past human groups as active agents of paleoenvironmental change as well as sophisticated responders to it. My research up North began where the ancestral Sheyenne River entered GLA from the west. After patient mentoring from Doc, results of that work suggested that such geomorphologically complex places are, in turn, ecological complex, exhibiting a tight mosaic of ecotones and microhabitats that provided a rich resource base attractive to prehistoric peoples. Later, the interdisciplinary SCAPE project (Study of Cultural Adaptations in the Prairie Ecozone project), was organized to apply that Holliday-inspired model. Doc’s model was fruitfully applied in many localities along the prairie-forest border, from Alberta to Manitoba. Now, twenty-six years later, and once again working along the shores of GLA, I am introducing a new generation of researchers to the Holliday way of doing things, from his interdisciplinarity and generosity to students and colleagues, to his singular lunch menu and use of movie lines for field communication.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 19919