Dr. C. Andrew Hemmings

For the moment Paleo to Pioneer is pretty much me and our board of directors.  I am Andy Hemmings, usually I publish things using the far more officious sounding Dr. C. Andrew Hemmings.   As P2P grows and develops more and more people will be involved.  This will include field and laboratory opportunities for students and interested volunteers so please let me know if you would like to get involved or help out.

I have been interested in archaeology since I was a very little kid.  My parents tell the tale of me saying I wanted to be an archaeologist since before they could figure out how I knew the word at three.  As one of those kids that started collecting beer cans and breweriana in the 1970s I have remained active in that hobby, though I started branching out into postcards, old photographs, and other ephemera in the 80s because you could find that material easier than you could find old beer cans.  I am particularly interested in the uses of Native American imagery and words in advertising and a planned book on this subject is listed in projects.

Presently Paleo to Pioneer is a non-profit corporation in the State of Florida that is also a federally recognized 501c3 being steered into projects that I have thought up and intend to explore. Largely these will be focused on the very early human arrivals to the New World and the more modern end of just Pre-Industrial America: more or less working on Paleoindian/Pleistocene topics and later historic issues as we developed into the modern world up through the turn of the 20th Century.  A lot of these posts and projects will have a heavy environmental component, particularly focused on what exactly changed and how might that information help inform us about the world we are in today.

I grew up in Minnesota around the Twin Cities.  Moved to Tucson just in time to graduate from Amphitheater High School in 85.  Graduated in 1991 from the University of Arizona with a BA in Anthropology.  Did contract archaeology and worked in the Navajo Nation Historic Preservation Department for a couple of years before heading to graduate school at the University of Florida.  I received my Anthropology Masters in 1999, and PhD in 2004 from UF. Followed by a Post-doctoral fellowship with the Gault Project at the University of Texas.  So pretty sure that makes me a GatorHornCat.  Clearly, I know way too much about every single mile of I-10 at this point.

I have been incredibly fortunate to have studied, worked, and published with many of the top people in the field for several decades now.  I am a fiend for the Paleoindian and Pleistocene literature and cannot stress enough to everyone how important it is to examine original sources.  I’m always interested in talking with other bibliophiles.  Direct examination of exactly what we think we know is incredibly important as each of us learns to master the body of knowledge that interests you.  Don’t take my word, or anyone else’s, for anything!  You need to learn it yourself by reading the original publications and archives and handling original specimens, wherever they may be found.  

Here are a couple of Early Paleoindian Clovis examples to illustrate what I mean about how do you know what you know (or more ominously, what you think you know): When you think of Clovis what sites inform your view-the type site at Blackwater Draw, NM, the San Pedro Valley sites in Arizona, what else?  Putting this website together is helping force me to do more data entry to my own dataset.  It looks like I will have close to 3,000 Clovis loci when I am done.  Are Yellowhawk and Kincaid Rockshelter, in Texas, part of your mental template, and if not why not?  Both contain an extraordinaire amount of manufacturing information with very small assemblages.  Finally, something that will be an article of its own: when you think of Blackwater Draw Locality #1 between Portales and Clovis, New Mexico, how many Clovis points are there that should be used to define the type?  Only the first two found by Cotter et al. in 1936?  My database has stalled at 86 for a while but I seriously doubt any one person has ever seen all of even those. 

In a word, there is no substitute for the right kind of experience and direct hands on research.  Filtering the data through someone else’s  world view introduces a level of separation that means you may never figure out ideas you have that are wrong, as in factually incorrect, because you did not learn the material directly yourself.  In the end, I don’t want anyone to have to take my word about anything!  But I do want to help make us all better at finding things and finding things out.