History
of the
Eastern
States Archeological Federation
John
Reid and Wm Jack Hranicky
1935 – 1991
And
1991
– 2003
John
Reid, Ron Thomas, and Jack Hranicky
When asked to write the history of
the Eastern States Archeological Federation (ESAF), we were not sure where to
start. After reading the Bulletins and small archives available, we found a
lot-of-history and can only present highlights.
At the end of the report, there is a list of the names of officers and
the dates that they served.
ESAF’s beginnings were auspicious. In
May 1933, Delaware, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania archeological
societies met in Trenton, New Jersey to discuss an interstate cooperation.
They agreed to continue meeting yearly under the name “Northeastern
States Conference and Archaeological Societies.”
It was found that by February of 1934 at the Philadelphia meetings that a
great number of other state societies were interested in becoming involved in
the conference.
One year later, on February 23, 1935, the constitution of the Eastern
States Archeological Federation was adopted at Rochester, New York.
There were seven states represented at this meeting.
The charter societies were from Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, New
Jersey, New York, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
The history of the next few years is limited.
There is mention of yearly meetings until 1943 and 1944, when only the
executive committee met. This was
because of wartime travel restrictions. In
1941 the first Bulletin was published. It
consisted of three pages with reports from 13 member societies.
The six new members were from Georgia, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode
Island, Vermont, and Virginia.
Bulletin Number 2 was printed in
February 1944. It contained an
interesting article entitled “’A’ Ration Books and Archaeology” by
Frederick Johnson. In this article,
Johnson dealt with doing analysis with the societies’ backlog of material and
doing library and map surveys because of gas shortages.
This sounded timely for 1977 with the then current price of gasoline.
A great number of societies suspended
meetings during the war because of the draft and gasoline rationing.
In 1936 the Federation established a project to compile an archeological
bibliography for the eastern United States.
One thousand, three hundred and seventy-three titles were published in
1939 under the direction of Dr. Cornelius Osgood.
A number of states were encouraged to do local bibliographies at that
time, and they were added to a second publication in 1948 (Research Publication
No. One, edited by Irving Rouse and John M. Goggin).
This published research publication was followed by a second one, “An
Anthropological Bibliography of the Eastern Seaboard, Volume II,” in 1963
under the editorship of Alfred I. Guthe and Patricia B. Kelly.
The first annual meeting after the war was held in November 1945 in
Massachusetts. In 1948 the
membership was increased by one when the Florida Anthropological Society joined
with a membership of 30 people. The
following year (1949) the New Hampshire Archaeological Society requested
membership and was accepted.
In the early 1950’s, there is some confusion as to membership in the
Federation. On the cover of the
Bulletins only twelve societies are shown. Societies
left off the cover of Bulletin Number 9, 1950 were those from Georgia, Maryland,
Massachusetts and Vermont. There was
no reason given in the Bulletin and, in fact, Massachusetts was represented in
the society report section.
In 1955 Bulletin Number 14 membership listing indicated a jump from twelve
to sixteen societies. The members
added at that time were Georgia, Maryland and Ontario as well as Massachusetts.
This was an all time high for membership and only Vermont and South
Carolina were not represented from the Atlantic watershed at that time.
In that same Bulletin, President C. A. Weslager wrote a brief history of
the Federation. In this, he gave a
list of officers from the beginning of ESAF, which we have updated.
He also talked of how each society should send five voting members to
deliberate all business matters at the annual meetings, plus one elected person,
who became a Vice President of the Federation and, along with elected four
officers, forms the nucleus of the Executive Board. This nucleus then elects
five staff directors in charge of Editorial, Research, Exhibits, Archeological
Education and Membership. These
people become ex officio members of the Board and transact the business of the
Federation.
In 1956 three new member societies joined the Federation, the states of
Alabama and Michigan and the Province of Quebec.
This brought the total membership of ESAF to nineteen.
In October 1960 the annual meetings were moved for the first time outside
of the United States to Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
This meeting marked the tenth year of the Ontario Archaeological Society
and the twenty-fifth year of the Eastern States Archeological Federation.
ESAF returned to Ontario for its 1988 Annual Meeting; unfortunately, the
Ontario society was no longer an ESAF member.
To date, John Reid is the only ESAF president who resided outside the
U.S.
Stepping back to 1962 for a moment, Tennessee was welcomed as the
twentieth state and province to become a member of the Federation.
At the 1964 meeting, there was a tribute paid to Kathryn B. Greywacz for
her work and devotion to the Federation for 31 years as Corresponding Secretary.
At the 1965 meetings, after a lengthy discussion, two more societies were
made members. The reason for the
discussion was that the states of Maine and Maryland were already represented in
the Federation; however, when second societies from each of thee states applied
for admission, they were accepted. These
new members brought the total membership to twenty-three societies.
In 1968 three more societies entered the Federation.
They were Mississippi, Vermont and South Carolina.
In 1969 a member from Ohio joined, and in 1972 the Kentucky
Archaeological Association was admitted to increase the membership to an all
time high of twenty-seven.
In 1973 the first number of “Archaeology of Eastern North America” was
published. It received critical
acclaim and set a high publication standard for the Federation.
Called AENA for short, it was edited by Louis Brennan.
To date, nineteen volumes have been published.
The Quebec society became inactive in 1973 and was dropped from
membership. In 1975, membership
changed again with Connecticut adding a society and Maryland dropping one.
The Virgin Islands Archaeological Society then applied for membership.
Then in 1976 the two Connecticut organizations joined forces as one
society. In 1977, the Ontario and
Florida groups dropped their memberships in ESAF.
A few other important developments
took place in 1976. First, a
business office was organized with a special position of Business Manager to
handle the day-to-day affairs of the Federation.
This office was located at the Island Field Archaeological Museum and
Research Center in Delaware. Another
important development was the creation of individual memberships and
institutional memberships in ESAF. Also,
there was the establishment of a quarterly newsletter which was distributed to
the individual membership. This
newsletter was short lived.
Finally, another bibliography was printed in 1977.
It covered the years 1959-1976. It
contained approximately nine thousand titles.
During the 1980s, many ESAF member
societies started major activities, such as amateur certification, fieldschools
for training members, amateur and professional awards for outstanding
achievements, special lectures named after someone in the society, displays at
state fairs, increased special publications and lately, archeology week.
In 1983, ESAF celebrated its 50th anniversary in Salem, Massachusetts.
This meeting had the largest attendance (approximately 500) of any
meeting. It brought together many
long-time ESAF participants and past officers.
In 1985, Wm Jack Hranicky organized a
call-in computer network, ASVNET/ESAFNET, which allowed anyone to call in and
obtain current events in archaeology. ESAF teamed with the Archeological Society
of Virginia to run the network.
This is briefly a review of the history of the Federation. What began in
1933 as a meeting of four states has developed into a thriving Federation of
twenty-four member societies and numerous institutional and individual members.
Annual meetings are held in various states hosted by local societies, and
as can be seen in the figures at the end of this paper, attendance at these
meetings is increasing steadily. The
publications of the Federation have kept pace with the expansion of ESAF; yearly
bulletins describing the annual meetings have continued; bibliographies have
been published throughout the course of the history of the Federation (the most
recent bibliography promises to be the most comprehensive to date); and, a
journal has been established to publish scholarly articles written by ESAF
members.
The early ESAF years provided the stable foundation for the evolution of
the Federation into a greater role in archeology.
It brought together “anyone” who was interested in American
archeology. And, as a result, ESAF
has always been considered the world’s largest organization of both amateur
and professional archeologists.
