Celebrating the Design Work of Bettye J. Broyles

Author(s): Karen Smith

Year: 2021

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Female Firsts: Celebrating Archaeology’s Pioneering Women on the 101st Anniversary of the 19th Amendment " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Like many archaeologists, the late Bettye J. Broyles discovered what she wanted to do in her twenties while enrolled in college. It was there where Broyles’s archaeological career began to take shape, and by summer of 1954 she had embarked on her first field school. Broyles went on to do archaeology in Georgia, North Carolina, West Virginia, Mississippi, and Alabama, eventually returning to her Tennessee roots in the 1980s. Indeed, the details of much of her life were penned by Hester A. Davis and featured in the aptly named book *Grit-Tempered: Early Women Archaeologists in the Southeastern United States. My interests concern Broyles’s pottery design work, only briefly described in *Grit-Tempered. Though only one publication resulted from her efforts to reconstruct Southeastern paddle stamped designs—an article that appeared in a Southeastern Archaeological Conference Bulletin—Broyles’s design work has served as a legacy and inspiration to those who have followed. In this paper, I discuss Broyles’s approach to design reconstruction and some of the insights she gleaned from it. I then describe recent work on a software program that seeks to reveal the design patterns that Broyles so carefully documented.

Cite this Record

Celebrating the Design Work of Bettye J. Broyles. Karen Smith. Presented at The 86th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. 2021 ( tDAR id: 466490)

Spatial Coverage

min long: -93.735; min lat: 24.847 ; max long: -73.389; max lat: 39.572 ;

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32417