“They left about the time I could begin to depend upon them”: Helen Sloan Daniels and the National Youth Administration Durango Public Library Museum Project

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 lesser known programs that funded archaeological excavations during the Great Depression was the National Youth Administration (NYA). NYA archaeology has been overshadowed by projects funded by its more prominent “cousin,” the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and its older “sibling” the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Helen Sloan Daniels, who lived all but four years of her life in Durango, Colorado, made both minor and major contributions to the archaeology and ethnology of the area around her hometown. Here, I focus on her work from 1936 to 1940 with the Durango Public Library Museum Project, which employed shifting—and small—numbers of young men and women provided by the NYA. Daniels actively worked with professionals on her project, consulting with them as she could. She and her technical advisor, I. F. Flora, made a particular effort to recover material suitable for the then relatively new technique of dendrochronology. Samples recovered by the NYA workers extended the local tree ring chronology back to AD 253.

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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 29864