James Ford’s Field And Lab Methods Modernized American Archaeology

STREET TALK
By Mickey Howley
WVMSA Director

The newly installed marker on Main Street reads: “James Ford born in Water Valley (1911-1968) was a pioneer in archaeology. Conducting extensive surveys across the Southeast, including the Mississippi Delta, he created a technique for dating sites using ceramic seriation. He also worked in Columbia and Peru. Ford’s field and lab methods modernized American archaeology.” Also in smaller print; “Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 2019”
Historic markers just don’t happen. It takes a real will and desire, funds and effort and, most of all, a real reason for the markers to be made and installed. What they usually do is signify a location and greater story. Dr. Maureen Meyers, an archaeology professor at the University of Mississippi, is the real motivator behind the marker.
Dr. Meyers joined the faculty at the University of Mississippi in 2013. She also serves as President of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference, an academic conference Ford co-founded in 1938; first held at the University of Michigan. He was 27 at the time and already an acknowledged expert on the ceramics of Southeastern Native Americans.
Professor Meyers teaches undergraduate courses with names like Introduction to Anthropology; Indians of Mississippi and the South; Archaeology of Mississippi & The South; Indians of North America; North American Archaeology; and Ceramic Analysis. Plus, she teaches graduate courses like Advanced Ceramic Analysis and Archaeology of Political Systems. And she has a get dirty course in actual digs; Archaeological Field Session. In every course she teaches, Ford’s work plays a seminal part.
Ford effectively recorded history, bringing back to light the lives of people who lived here for thousands of years via his measuring the flow of time using ceramics.
In his ceramic seriation, Ford brought incredible precision to what at first might seem a chaotic task, Ford’s primary sorting characteristic was using decorative motifs and decorative elements.
Ford’s description of his process was very detailed, here is a very small sample of his writing:
“Where two motifs are used in the same decoration and each is expressed by a different element, the dominant motif with its element is placed over the inferior. If the manner of combination applies either to the superior or inferior features, it is also placed either above or below the line.” I mean he was really into this.
While at LSU, Ford initiated an analysis of pottery he and Moreau Chambers (also a Mississippian) had collected between 1927 and 1935. James Griffin at the University of Michigan, who founded the Southeastern Archaeological Conference with Ford, was analyzing ceramics at the very same time. These two scholars used the same basic analytical technique, putting sherds in the same pile that looked alike, their manners of exposition stand in stark contrast. Griffin’s presentation is casual, Ford’s is exhaustive.
A frequently overlooked quality of James Ford is his mechanical ingenuity. During his time in the Arctic, he converted a Model T Ford chassis into a snowmobile with a rear-mounted propeller and drove it several hundred miles. In 1940, he sent the War Department detailed blueprints of his machine under the title “Motorized Surface Travel in the Arctic.” That’s right, a Model T based hybrid airboat like snowmobile You got to like a guy like that.
It is a real hope that people, especially young people in Water Valley, see the marker and it sparks a curiosity, not only about Ford as a role model, but about what is possible.
I would like to thank those who made the marker unveiling event possible; James McCormick for the installation, Lucia Holloway for contacting James Ford’s relatives, Mayor Donald Gray for speaking and putting a perspective on it, Steve Ford for speaking about his family, Brother Rogers from Archives and History for driving up from Jackson and also speaking, and the Chamber of Commerce for providing refreshments. Most of all, Dr. Maureen Meyers, who first encountered Ford’s work 30 years ago as an undergraduate in archaeology in Virginia and never forgot how important it was.