Madeline Kneberg Lewis (1903–1996) was an American archaeologist and professor of anthropology at the University of Tennessee. She is most famous for her work on excavations in the Tennessee Valley, beginning in the 1930s. She was instrumental in establishing the anthropology department at the University of Tennessee as well as the Frank H. McClung Museum. She was the first female full professor at Tennessee outside of home economics and among the first prominent female archaeologists in the United States.
Early life and education
Kneberg was born in 1903 in Moline, Illinois to artist and interior designer Charles Kneberg and his wife Ann (married 1879). She travelled to Italy in 1924 to study art and music in preparation for a career as a musical performer, but after four years returned to the United States and began training as a nurse at the Presbyterian Hospital of Chicago. She engaged in to graduate study in sociology at the University of Chicago, where she was persuaded to study physical anthropology under Fay-Cooper Cole, the founder of the university's Department of Anthropology. There she completed all of the requirements for a PhD save her dissertation, though she published on her graduate school research on hair variability in 1935 and 1936. She taught at Beloit College in Wisconsin for one year in 1937 before being taken onto the staff of Thomas Lewis at the University of Tennessee in 1938, who was working for the Works Progress Administration on sites inundated by TVA projects.
Tennessee Valley excavations
Beginning with the Marksville, Louisiana excavations in 1933, money and work crews from a succession of federal relief agencies (the Civil Works Administration, Federal Emergency Relief Administration, Works Progress Administration, Tennessee Valley Authority, and National Park Service) were committed to major excavations all over the region.
The TVA, established in 1933 to provide for navigation, flood control, and rural electrification, was perhaps the most important agency in fostering archaeology in Tennessee and surrounding states. The agency's dam construction efforts threatened to inundate large numbers of sites, but was persuaded to also engage in salvage archeology, under the direction of archeological consultant William Webb of the University of Kentucky.
Archaeological projects in Tennessee were placed under the responsibility of Tom Lewis at the University of Tennessee. He assembled a staff of archaeologists and physical anthropologists that included Madeline Kneberg, who would take over the management of the university's archaeology laboratory and work closely with Lewis in drafting many of its most important reports. These included major surveys of the archaeology of the Chickamauga Basin (1941) and of Hiwassee Island (1946). Due to financial constraints and philosophical conflicts with the TVA and Webb, the Chickamauga report was not published in full until 1995. However, Hiwassee Island: An Archaeological Account of Four Tennessee Indian Peoples became a classic in the field, established as a model by Walter Taylor in his widely read A Study in Archaeology. Kneberg and Lewis also composed a 2,000 page manual for the UT lab, which detailed protocols for all stages of excavation and analysis and described a sophisticated catalog system for sites and artifacts.