Shiner, and Paul Hudson—three seasons (from 1954 to 1956) of extensive fieldwork. In 1958, this project and the earlier pioneering excavations on the site by j. c. harrington (1936– 1941) were described and published in Cotter’s classic work, Archaeological Excavations at Jamestown, Virginia.

After working at Jamestown, Cotter returned to Philadelphia, where he had previously done graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania (1936–1937), and completed his doctorate in anthropology there in 1959. Although almost fifty years old, he set out to use the city and its institutions to build his newly adopted specialization. His primary employment was as the northeast regional archaeologist (1957– 1970) for the National Park Service office in the city, but it was his secondary affiliations with the University of Pennsylvania and its University Museum that gave him a broader base for building American historical archaeology. Cotter worked in three different but equally constructive settings: as an educator, as an active field archaeologist, and as a professional organizer for the discipline.

In 1960, at the invitation of the new Department of American Civilization at the University of Pennsylvania, Cotter taught a class entitled “Problems and Methods of Historical American Archaeology,” the first academic class anywhere in the United States and elsewhere to carry the designation, “historical archaeology.” For almost twenty years he taught a series of courses that introduced students to this new subject, and because the city itself was the site explored, he helped to create urban historical archaeology in America. In 1992, he coauthored with Daniel G. Roberts and Michael Parrington The Buried Past: An Archaeological History of Philadelphia, the first such synthesis for a major U.S. city.

Much earlier, in January 1967, he was one of a small group of established scholars who assembled in Dallas, Texas, and founded the Society for Historical Archaeology. Cotter served as the society’s first president (1967) and coedited the initial volume of its journal, Historical Archaeology. Twice he invited the new society to meet in Philadelphia, first to celebrate the county’s bicentennial (1976) and six years later to mark the city’s three-hundredth anniversary (1682–1982).

Shortly before his death, the Society for Historical Archaeology created the John L. Cotter Award in Historical Archaeology to honor his memory and to recognize the achievements of researchers (including students) at the start of their professional careers.

Robert L. Schuyler

See also

Historical Archaeology

References

Cotter, John L. 1958. Archaeological Excavations at Jamestown, Virginia. Archaeological Research Series, no. 4. Washington, DC: National Park Service.

Cotter, John L., Daniel G. Roberts, and Michael Parrington. 1992. The Buried Past: An Archaeological History of Philadelphia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Crawford, O.G.S.

(1886–1957)

O. G.S. Crawford was born in India and grew up with aunts in England. He took an Oxford degree in geography, and the subject of his short thesis was a field survey of archaeology in the Andover district of England. He went to the Sudan to excavate with the Wellcome expedition until World War I began; then he served in the Royal Flying Corps as an observer, was shot down, and became a prisoner of war.

After supplying archaeological details to correct revised editions of Ordnance Survey maps, Crawford was appointed in 1920 as the survey’s first archaeological officer, a post he held until his retirement in 1946. Visible monuments and earthworks had been recorded since the survey’s first mapping of Britain early in the nineteenth century, but Crawford extended and developed this work into a much fuller record of the nation’s visible archaeology, drawing on both scattered or systematic records in other institutions and new field surveys. As well as providing better archaeological notice in the ordinary maps, he surveyed for and drew up a remarkable series of period maps, beginning with Roman Britain (1924), the best being, in Crawford’s own view, the two sheets of Britain in the Dark Ages (1935).