The Origin of the ‘Chicago Method’ Excavation Techniques: Contributions of William Nickerson and Frederick Starr

Abstract

What were the origins of the ‘Chicago method’ of scientific excavation? What is it and how did it get that name? Does its origin predate its popular employment at excavations in the USA during the 1930s and 1940s, and go back to institutional competition between Frederic Ward Putnam of the Field Museum and Frederick Starr of the University of Chicago? Or was it the result of the fieldwork of avocational archaeologist and one of Putnam’s first students, William Baker Nickerson, who implemented it as the basis of his fieldwork, and proved its efficacy, for many years before he retired in 1921? Nickerson’s detailed notes on the results of his thorough stratigraphic excavation techniques, used at many archaeological sites in Iowa, Illinois, Ohio and Minnesota, were passed on to the first University of Chicago field party doing archaeological work in Illinois, that consequently became the foundations of the later ‘Chicago method’.