who had worked so diligently on the excavation, Fontana and Greenleaf analyzed the artifacts, nearly all of them mass produced and machine-made, as carefully as if they had been hand-crafted objects of the pre-Industrial Revolution. The results of their analyses were published as “Johnny Ward’s Ranch: A Study in Historic Archaeology” in the society’s journal, The Kiva (28, no. 12, October-December 1962).

../images/Johnny.jpg

Johnny Ward’s Ranch (January 16, 1961), Patagonia, Arizona. Excavation of this late nineteenth-century site by Bernard L. Fontana, J. Cameron Greenleaf, and members of the Arizona Archaeological and Historical Society helped to initiate an expansion in the type and age of historic sites worked on in the American West.

(Bernard Fontana)

The study was the first in the annals of U.S. archaeology to take seriously the products resulting from the ideas of interchangeable parts and mass production by machines. Pioneering descriptive and historical studies of square-cut nails, wire nails, tin cans, metallic cartridges, ironstone ceramics, machine-blown bottles, and similar artifacts were presented. The report became the first to give credence and respectability to what came to be labeled “tin can archaeology,” and as such it became a landmark in the history of archaeology in the United States.

Bernard L. Fontana

See also

United States of America, Prehistoric Archaeology

Jordan

The area known today as Jordan (Transjordan) lies between Palestine (Cisjordan or modern israel and the Palestinian Territories) and mesopotamia and is intimately connected to these surrounding regions of the Near East, in both geography and history (see map). This brief survey of the development of archaeology in Jordan will outline the major phases of exploration and the relationship of work in this region to the broader development of archaeology in the Middle East.

The Earliest Phase of Exploration, 1805–1918

“Who that has ever traveled in Palestine has not longed to cross the Jordan valley to those mysterious hills that close ever eastward view with their long horizontal outline, their overshadowing height, their deep purple shade?”

With these words from his 1856 travel log, Arthur Stanley, the dean of Westminster in London, summed up the relationship between Palestine and Transjordan for the earliest explorers