James Ford

James Ford was a nationally known archaeologist born and raised in Mississippi. His accomplishments include the development of the ceramic seriation technique, groundbreaking archaeology survey methodology, a typology debate with fellow archaeologist Albert Spaulding, a founding role in the Southeastern Archaeological Conference, and finally, his work on formative cultures in the Americas.

Ford was born in Water Valley in 1911, and moved with his family to Clinton in 1919. After graduating high school in 1927, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History hired Ford to investigate American Indian archaeological sites, and he spent summers conducting fieldwork at many of the state’s most important sites. Ford received degrees from Mississippi College (BA), Louisiana State University (MA), and Columbia University (PhD). In 1947 he joined the American Museum of Natural History as an assistant curator of North American archaeology and was promoted to curator. In 1963 Ford was elected president of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1964 he served as a curator at the Florida State Museum in Gainesville, while simultaneously serving as the professor of anthropology at the University of Florida. He received the Spinden Medal in 1966 for outstanding accomplishments in theory, methodology, and chronology of the archaeology of the Western Hemisphere.

Ford is perhaps best known for the technique of ceramic seriation. Beginning in the 1930s there was no way to absolutely date an archaeological site; rather, archaeologists used relative dating, but were fairly limited in their use of it. As a result of a new methodology of surveying large areas to identify sites, primarily in Louisiana and Mississippi, Ford was able to establish sequences of occupation across large regions based on the changing types of American Indian ceramics found at these sites. This resulted in the first relative chronology of American Indian cultures across the Southeast.

During the Great Depression, Ford worked for several agencies on seminal projects across the Southeast at multiple archaeological sites, including the Lamar Mounds and the Ocmulgee site in Georgia and the Marksville and Crooks sites in Louisiana. Here, his seriation method was honed and duplicated by other archaeologists working across the Southeast.

An important part of developing this technique and applying it was Ford’s role as a founding member of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference in 1938. This conference was initially founded to compare ceramic types across the region. It is now the primary regional archaeological organization in the Southeast, with a well-respected academic journal published four times a year, and approximately 750 members, who meet annually.

In 1940–41 Ford teamed with Philip Phillips and James B. Griffin to undertake an extensive survey of the Lower Mississippi River Valley. This project was groundbreaking in its use of surface collections and archeological excavations to survey a large area to identify change over time. In 1951 Phillips, Ford and Griffin published the “Archaeological Survey of the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, 1940–1947.” It is still used as the founding text for archaeology in the region.

Ford also applied his seriation and survey method techniques to other regions, including Cauca Valley, Columbia, and the Viru Valley of Peru. The latter project is now regarded as innovative for its methods and teamwork approach. He returned to Peru in 1958 and 1963, conducting surveys in the Chira, Piura, and Lambayeque valleys, and later along the Veracruz coast in Mexico. This work, combined with his earlier work in the Southeast, led Ford to consider ideas of diffusion and formative cultures, which were published in 1969.

Ford was also part of a well-known debate about typology with fellow archaeologist Albert Spaulding. The Ford-Spaulding Debate of the early 1950s is still taught and debated in graduate programs across the country as an example of scientific debate and because of its topic, which asked whether types were real to the people who made them, or only to the archaeologist who identified them. This question contributes more broadly to anthropological examinations of emic and etic views of culture, both of which inform our understanding of cultures.

Ford was a curator at the American Museum of Natural History from 1946 to 1964. His noteworthy achievements there included work at the World Heritage site of Poverty Point, Louisiana, which resulted in numerous publications and a better understanding of this Late Archaic mound site, an anomaly in the Southeastern region. He also worked at the Jaketown site near Belzoni, Mississippi, attempting to understand its relationship to the nearby Poverty Point National Historic Landmark site. In addition, he is known for his archaeological and ethnological work in Alaska among the Inuit. Beginning in 1931 Ford traveled there several times to conduct research and collect specimens. Many of these items were given to the Smithsonian Institution, who in turn donated them to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, and they ultimately became the property of the University of Mississippi.