Dean Richard Snow (born October 18, 1940) is an archeologist and an American ethnohistorian who is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University who has conducted extensive archeological research on the Iroquois Indian nations of northeastern America, and other indigenous cultures in the highlands of Mexico, and in Spain and France.
[3] In 1977 he was asked by the U.S. Department of Justice to act as a historical consultant involving Indian land claims against the state of Maine.
His works include a new edition of Archaeology of Native North America, co-authored with Nancy Gonlin and Peter Siegel, published in 2019.
[1] While in New York Snow conducted archaeological field investigations and excavations for the Park Service at the Saratoga battlefield from 1972 to 1977 in preparation for the 1977 bicentennial of the battle.
Snow relied heavily upon low altitude aerial photographs, covering an area of approximately ten square miles,[8] from which he used to construct a series of base maps that outlined earthworks, roads, and hidden foundations of old structures that existed at the time of the battles.
In order to verify the identify of the various structures Snow performed numerous archeological test exccavations in and around the battlefield, and in the process unearthed a number of artifacts, along with two human skeletons found at the location of the British redoubts built in 1777.
Snow for his assistance as a historical consultant in the preparation of their case on behalf of the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy Indian tribes involving land claims they had made against the State of Maine.
[13] Beginning in 1982 Snow initiated The Mohawk Valley Project, which involved excavations and field investigations that continued over a 13 year period.