Florence Hawley’s Enduring Legacy in Southeastern Archaeology and Beyond

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.

One of the pioneers of dendrochronology, Florence Hawley was employed by Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in the 1930s during the archaeological excavations that were conducted prior to impoundment of Norris Reservoir. Hawley’s work was one of the earliest attempts at establishing a tree-ring chronology in the Southeast. While Hawley would go on to have an illustrious career in archaeology in the Southwest, unfortunately, sexist attitudes would undermine her efforts in the Southeast and her early work was never published. It would be decades before the scientific community realized the importance of this research both within and beyond the archaeological discipline. This paper highlights Hawley’s early research in the Southeast and describes how TVA is using her early research on red cedar samples to better understand the impacts of large droughts on TVA’s operating system.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Female Firsts: Celebrating Archaeology’s Pioneering Women on the 101st Anniversary of the 19th Amendment

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32730