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1953. After serving two years in the U.S. Army, he continued his education at the University of Arizona, where he entered the Ph.D. program in anthropology. He received his degree in 1960 and took a position as field historian with the University of Arizona Library. Two years later, he became an ethnologist at the Arizona State Museum. In 1977, Fontana once again became the library’s field historian, a post he held until he retired in 1992. He continues to be active despite his official retirement.
Primarily as a result of a graduate archaeology seminar, Fontana became interested in historic sites. In 1958, while still a student, he and others began excavations at the eighteenth-century mission of San Xavier de Bac, outside Tucson, Arizona. This work was followed in 1962 with the publication of a book on Papago Indian pottery, a study that has achieved status as a regional classic and remains the only reliable source on this historic pottery. Also published in 1962 was the johnny ward’s ranch report on the 1960–1961 excavations at a nineteenth-century site in southern Arizona. The ranch was the first non-Spanish period historic site to be excavated in Arizona, and the pioneering report received national recognition because it was the first to treat late-nineteenth-century interchangeable parts type artifacts seriously. The report remains a widely used classic.
Additionally, Fontana taught the first-ever regular historic sites archaeology course in the American Southwest from 1966 to 1972. This stimulating and innovative course served to encourage many students to pursue a career in the field.
Fontana’s professional career, which has spanned thirty-five years, has been punctuated by contributions to historic sites archaeology in addition to those in ethnography, history, and related subjects. Despite the fact that archaeology was not his major field, Fontana undoubtedly will be best remembered for his contributions to historic sites archaeology at a time when historic sites were neither popular nor valued.
(1834–1912)
Robert Bruce Foote was an officer of the Geological Survey of India employed mainly in the southern part of the country. He was deeply influenced by the Royal Society’s acceptance of the geological antiquity of man in 1859. Both Neolithic stone tools and microlithic flakes and tools had been found in various parts of India, but it was Foote who discovered Paleolithic evidence in a gravel pit near Madras in 1863. He pursued his prehistoric interests for the rest of his working life, publishing a two-volume catalog of his collection in the Madras Museum (Foote 1914, 1916). He worked all over southern India and in Gujarat in western India. Many of the premises he developed, based on his study of the prehistory and protohistory of the areas where he worked, have been found to be substantially correct by modern researchers (see Chakrabarti 1979).
Foote’s work symbolizes a vigorous phase of prehistoric discoveries in India during the second half of the nineteenth century. It was during this time that the basic significance and the general distribution and stratigraphy of prehistoric artifacts, and their association with extinct fauna in some cases, came to be well understood. Among his contemporary workers were Valentine Ball in east India, William King in south India, and A.C.L. Carlleyle and William Cockburn in central India. However, it must be emphasized that investigators during this period were concerned not only with stone tools but also with a wide ranges of “prehistoric” finds from southern Indian Iron Age megaliths to Neolithic sites. Rock paintings were discovered throughout central India.
References
Chakrabarti, D.E. 1979. “Robert Bruce Foote and Indian Prehistory.” East and West 29: 11–26.
Foote, R.B. 1979. Prehistoric and Protohistoric Antiquities of India. Delhi: Leelader’s Publications.
(1911–1968)
James Alfred Ford was an outstanding American archaeologist from the 1930s to the late 1960s. He was born in Water Valley, Mississippi, on 12
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