Mark Norton at the Tennessee Division of Archaeology has just sent out the announcement for the next meeting of the Old Stone Fort Archaeological Society. You may read it by clicking on the following link:
March 2014 Meeting Announcement
The Archaeology in Tennessee blog would like to take this opportunity to congratulate one of our favorite archaeologists, Dr. Kevin E. Smith, for finding the long lost Otto Giers Collection of Native American artifacts. Great job guy!!! Great job!!!
Please try your best to attend this meeting and bring some of your friends with you. This is a rare opportunity to see numerous photographs of fantastic Tennessee artifacts that have been seen by very few people over the past 100 years.
Finally, in light of this discovery, one has to ask a question too—and rightly so. If this famous collection was cooling its heels in a federal artifact repository for nearly a century without anyone really knowing what it was or even that it was there, how many other famous, long lost artifacts and collections are sleeping in the bowels of other museums and institutions throughout the United States and in some foreign nations? Might portions of the long lost Payne Collection be snoozing in one of these places? Rather than excavating just archaeological sites, this recent work by Kevin Smith strongly suggests that we need to be excavating our museum basements and attics.
