Waldo Rudolph Wedel (September 10, 1908 – August 27, 1996) was an American archaeologist and a central figure in the study of the prehistory of the Great Plains.
In 1928, he transferred to the University of Arizona to study under archaeologist Byron Cummings and visiting professor William Morris Davis.
In the 1930s, Wedel, William Duncan Strong and A. T. Hill found archaeological evidence in Nebraska different from that of the prehistoric Central Plains and Woodland traditions.
The goal of the project was to survey the roughly 500,000 square miles (1,300,000 km2) of the Missouri River Basin for archaeological remains that were to be affected by the construction of federal reservoirs.
Although the project was technically a division of the Smithsonian, it was funded by a cooperative agreement between federal agencies such as the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers.
[8] The River Basin Project was eventually transferred to the National Park Service and led to the development of the Midwest Archeological Center.
This approach in archaeology focused on identifying cultural links between modern native groups with complexes found in the material record.
Wedel explains his project: "Here the task becomes one of linking the archaeological record with the documentary, of correlating late material culture complexes with the various tribal units known or thought to have inhabited certain localities".
He cited archaeology, geology, climatology, and biology as useful disciplines for explaining the past in a more comprehensive and insightful manor than typically practiced.
[15] He also was a long advocate for the use of the scientific method in archaeology, stating: …I hold that, whatever its ultimate goal, archaeology can progress surely only as its practitioners adhere to the method and attitude of science – in essence, the acceptance of observed and verifiable facts, the eschewing of unsupported speculations and personal dicta, and a circumspect tolerance of that for which the observational, experimental, or experiential evidence is not immediately at hand.