only the second woman to study in the Department of Anthropology. Over the next seven years Wormington continued to work at the museum, and she undertook fieldwork, studied for her Ph.D., married, and volunteered with the Red Cross during World War II. She excavated sites in Alberta, Canada, for her doctoral fieldwork and received her Ph.D. in 1954.

Four years later Wormington traveled to the USSR, and in 1961 and 1964 she returned there to study Siberian archaeological collections, looking for similarities to and differences from Clovis material in the United States. There were none, and she came to believe that the Clovis people were not the earliest North Americans. Her final fieldwork in the mid-1960s was at the Frazier site near Greeley, Colorado. Many of the next generation of prehistoric archaeologists worked with her at this important Paleo-Indian site, dated to 9500 b.p.

In 1968 Marie Wormington was elected the first female president of the Society for American Archaeology, having served two terms as a vice-president (1950–1951 and 1955–1956). After thirty-one years she left the Denver Museum in 1968 to teach at Arizona State University (1968–1969); she then taught at Colorado College (1969–1970) and the University of Minnesota (1973), and from 1972 to 1986 she was an adjunct professor at Colorado College. In 1983 she became the first female archaeologist to win the society for american archaeology’s Distinguished Service Award.

Tim Murray

See also

United States of America, Prehistoric Archaeology

References

Stanford, Dennis J., and Jane S. Day, eds. 1992. Ice Age Hunters of the Rockies. Denver: Museum of Natural History; Niwot: University Press of Colorado.

Worsaae, Jens Jacob

(1821–1886)

As a boy in denmark, Jens Jacob Worsaae carried out excavations and published his first archaeological study at the age of seventeen. Worsaae came into contact with christian thomsen at the National Museum of Antiquities in Copenhagen and worked as his assistant while studying law.

In 1843, Worsaae wrote and published The Primeval Antiquities of Denmark (published in 1849 in English), a result of his work with Thomsen, in which he observed that the three-age system was particularly dependent on the find associations of artifacts (ie. the stratigraphic contexts of the artifacts—where and with what other materials they were found). Unlike Thomsen, Worsaae did not just work in museums—his great strength was that he also worked in the field and was an excavator. In 1844, Worsaae became a full-time antiquarian, and in 1847, he became the inspector of ancient monument preservation in Denmark.

Between 1846 and 1847, Worsaae traveled extensively in Europe, England, and Ireland. He was the first archaeologist to undertake a survey of German archaeological material—which was scattered among dozens of provincial museums, reflecting the fragmentation of Germany’s politics. He saw that the preoccupation of English and French archaeologists with Roman monuments had led them to neglect their prehistory and that Thomsen’s three-age system could be used across Europe. He understood that as a result of reorganization and their national character, the Scandinavian archaeological collections were unique and provided an opportunity to develop a “scientific” archaeology —and that in this regard they were well ahead of the rest of Europe.

There is no doubt that without Thomsen’s and Swedish antiquarian bror emil hildebrand’s collections, Worsaae would not have formulated his important chronological advances—his divisions of the Stone Age and the Bronze Age into two periods and the Iron Age into three. On the basis of these collections and his great knowledge of European archaeological material, Worsaae became the first archaeologist to place prehistoric monuments in a wider and comparative context, both socially and historically—as a result, he received the title of “founder of comparative archaeology.” In 1854, Worsaae became a professor, and in 1865, he became director of both the Museum of Nordic Antiquities and the Ethnographic Museum in Copenhagen.