A. T. Hill
His work on sites in and around Nebraska, with such collaborators as William Duncan Strong and Waldo Wedel, was instrumental in the development of Great Plains archaeology.
[4] On the frontier, schools and teachers were few, and the responsibilities of an oldest son on a dryland farm were many; Hill's formal education ended in the fourth grade.
As he travelled, he worked a variety of odd jobs: dishwasher in a mining camp, photographer, portrait painter, and market hunter.
[5][6] In 1806, a party led by Zebulon Pike had visited a Pawnee village on the Republican River shortly after the departure of a much larger Spanish expedition.
Over the next year and a half, Hill excavated at the site, discovering additional Spanish material and other evidence that there had been an important Pawnee village there.
[10]: 372 In the following year, he began fieldwork along the Republican River in southern Nebraska, assisted by graduate student Waldo Wedel.
[11] Hill made contact with the party and, once he was convinced that they were serious students of the past and not mere relic-hunters, invited them to his property in Webster County.
[9] This was the first application of Strong's direct historical approach to Central Plains archaeology;[4] in 1936, Wedel published his 1930 master's thesis as the seminal An Introduction to Pawnee Archeology.
Although he did not give them their present names, he recognized the existence of distinct indigenous cultures in the region: the Woodland, Upper Republican, Lower Loup, and Pawnee complexes.
[2] In the mid-1930s, Hill, Wedel, and Strong found archaeological evidence in Nebraska of a previously unknown prehistoric culture, different from the Central Plains and Woodland traditions.
[10]: 366–67 From 1933 until 1941, when the United States' entry into World War II put a halt to it, he oversaw extensive excavation projects in Nebraska and Kansas.
[11] He managed the conversion of the museum from a library and research institution to one with popular appeal, and contributed his "unsurpassed" collection of Pawnee artifacts to it.
