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George Hampton Young founded Waverly Plantation in 1841, and it remained in the Young family until 1963. This National Historic Landmark contains one of the South’s finest plantation houses, complete with its own gas plant and swimming pool, built in the 1850s. Young founded the University of Mississippi and was a prominent political figure in Mississippi. He owned 3,420 acres and controlled much more; with 217 slaves, he was a big planter. In 1893, the National Fox Hunters Association was organized at Waverly.
After the American Civil War, a tenant and sharecropping system was established, which lasted until the 1930s. In 1979, archaeological excavations were conducted at six tenant farmer sites, a general store, a brick kiln, and a steam-powered cotton gin and sawmill under the direction of William H. Adams, Timothy B. Riordan, and Steven D. Smith. Historical geographer Howard Adkins researched the documentary history of this tenant-farming community. Folklorists David F. Barton and Betty J. Belanus interviewed eighty-nine informants, forty-three extensively, and their recordings are in the Library of Congress, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, and the Indiana University Folklore Archives. This study marked the first archaeological investigation of tenant farming in the South. The community approach used to study tenant farmers and planters provided a broader historical context for the material recovered. Adams and Smith compared the purchases recorded in the general-store ledger with the artifacts from those tenant sites to evaluate what kinds of items were not being recovered archaeologically.
See also
United States of America, Prehistoric Archaeology
(1890–1976)
After an illustrious career as an archaeologist of the British Iron Age, Eric Mortimer Wheeler was the director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India between 1944 and 1948 and served as the archaeological adviser to the government of Pakistan in the 1950s. His major excavations in the subcontinent as director-general were at Taxila, harappa, Arikamedu, and Brahmagiri and on behalf of the Pakistan Department of Archaeology, at Charsada and Mohenjo Daro. Among his publications on the subcontinent mention should be made of the “Indian” chapters in the autobiographical Still Digging (Wheeler 1954) and Rome beyond the Imperial Frontiers (Wheeler 1955) and the books The Indus Civilization (Whee1er 1968) and Early India and Pakistan (Wheeler 1959). His “Indian” writings were published mainly in Ancient India, an official publication of the Archaeological Survey of India, which he himself edited.
His major achievements in the field of South Asian archaeology were the establishment of a training school at Taxila in 1946 to make Indian students familiar with his layer-based method of digging and the basic academic results of his excavations, which included, among other things,
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