Notes on the Career of Robert E. Funk, Ph.D.

Bob showed an early interest in archaeology.  He was born in Rome, New York but his family moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where teen-age Bob learned a great deal about archaeology informally from Dr. Carl Chapman as well as some of the great Midwestern avocational archaeologists, including Paul Titterington and Gregory Perino.  He earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Columbia University, and attended Archaeological Field School under Glenn Black, the excavator of Angel Mounds in Indiana.  Glenn Black was an early proponent in the United States for using baulks in excavation to maintain stratigraphic control.  Later, during the 1970s, baulks separating Bob’s large excavation squares in the Upper Susquehanna Valley project were key to reading site stratigraphy and writing the region’s Precontact period cultural history.  In the 1990s, Bob wrote that Glenn Black had set a standard for excavation that Bob strove for throughout his career.  After field school, and having earned his M.A., Bob served in the U.S. Army.  Bob joked that from the Army’s perspective, his anthropology degrees prepared him well enough for the role it assigned him: Radio Operator.  After the Army, Bob spent two field seasons in the Yucatan at Dzibilchaltun, working as an excavation supervisor under E. Wyllis Andrews IV (Funk 1996). 

At the New York State Museum, Bob was involved in four major archaeological projects and several smaller ones.  They included his early 1960s survey of Hudson Valley sites, which he used to support his Ph.D. dissertation project, An Archaic Framework for the Hudson Valley (Funk 1966).  He incorporated much of the dissertation into a larger work published in 1976 as Recent Contributions to Hudson Valley Prehistory. Bob added significant new material to the dissertation content when he wrote Recent Contributions (Funk 1976).  These additions included a section on Paleoindian peoples based largely on his investigations at the West Athens Hill Site (excavated 1968-1970); and the definition of the Middle Woodland period Fox Creek phase ( A.D. 300-600), which combined information from the excavation of the Westheimer Site on Schoharie Creek with data from Hudson and Susquehanna Valley Middle Woodland sites.  These and other additions expanded the Hudson Valley subject beyond the Archaic period, but just as important, they reflected new thinking based on data obtained after the dissertation was completed. 

One of Bob’s interpretations of Hudson Valley prehistory bucked the conventional wisdom that Ritchie had established.  His new view was based primarily on the stratigraphy at the Sylvan Lake Rockshelter in eastern Dutchess County where his excavations demonstrated that the Laurentian tradition Vergennes and Vosburg phases preceded the Lamoka-like Sylvan Lake phase.  This reversed the Lamoka before Laurentian sequence as Ritchie had proposed for the Finger Lakes region (Ritchie 1965).  Ritchie (1969) revised his view in a limited way, referring to the Hudson Valley as a special, regional exception, but Bob suspected that the Sylvan Lake data predicted a more universal sequence which he expected to find in other areas to the west and east.  During his career, Bob periodically obtained stratigraphic and radiocarbon data that supported his view.

The Settlement Patterns Project is another of the major projects Bob was involved with at the New York State Museum (Ritchie and Funk 1973).  He collaborated with Ritchie on this from 1960 to 1970, with the early effort concurrent with the Hudson Valley Archaic project.  The Settlement Patterns Project was supported by a National Science Foundation grant awarded to Ritchie.  The research strategy was to excavate sites of different periods, typically west of the Hudson Valley, to see how site characteristics varied by environmental association and time period, and particularly, to collect data on fortifications, houses, other features such as pits and hearths, and their arrangement within archaeological sites. These data could then be used to infer the organization of ancient indigenous communities.  Several graduate students who became professional archaeologists in the 1960s and 1970s  worked or trained as field assistants for Ritchie and Funk on the Settlement Patterns Project. 

Bob’s third major archaeological project, focused on excavation at Mohawk village sites, was an outgrowth of the settlement patterns project with the goal of increasing the ability to compare Iroquois village sites and occupation sequences.  For example, a colleague, James Tuck, had been conducting similar settlement pattern research at the same time at Onondaga village sites.  Ritchie and Funk published two of their Mohawk village site reports, on the Getman and Garoga sites, in Aboriginal Settlement Patterns in the Northeast.  Two other, large Mohawk village excavations, at the Klock and Smith-Pagerie sites, required significant further analysis and remained unpublished.  However, after retirement, Bob worked with archaeologist Robert Kuhn to publish the Klock and Smith-Pagerie site reports, along with a revised and updated report on the Garoga site, leading to important interpretive and comparative analyses (Funk and Kuhn 2003).

The last of Bob Funk’s major projects was the Upper Susquehanna Prehistory Project.  The resulting two-volume report, published in 1993 and 1998, is titled Archaeological Investigations in the Upper Susquehanna Valley, New York State (Funk 1993, 1998).  Bob conceived this project and initiated the field research just as Ritchie retired in 1971.  His goal was to investigate the indigenous prehistory of the relatively unexplored Susquehanna River drainage, located between the Hudson Valley and the Finger Lakes region.  This study area is located perfectly to shed light on why Ritchie’s western New York and Bob’s Hudson Valley Late Archaic period cultural sequences could exist in reverse order. 

Work in the Upper Susquehanna project was intense during the 1970s, involving New York State Museum staff and archaeological instructors and field school students from the Oneonta and Albany State University campuses.  This project continued into the 1980s, when Bob addressed specific questions where more information was needed.  The project was interdisciplinary, involving several geomorphologists, State Museum palynologist Donald Lewis, multiple radiocarbon labs, and radiocarbon analysis expert Bruce Rippeteau. Rippeteau and William Starna, both SUNY Oneonta faculty at the time, collaborated in the fieldwork and analysis.  In addition, Bob’s State Museum anthropology colleague, Charles Gillette, conducted ethnohistoric research.  At the beginning of this project, Bob hired Beth Wellman to work as an assistant archaeologist and for several decades thereafter, she continued to serve with Bob in that trusted role.  The Upper Susquehanna research was supported by radiocarbon dates that were so numerous and well-deployed that not only were archaeological phases assigned ages with a high degree of confidence, but the geologists could use the dates from stratified archaeological and geological contexts to measure rates of floodplain-building along different stretches of river.  The team could then consider variation in floodplain growth trajectories relative to the history and intensity of Indigenous occupation over centuries and millennia. 

The major findings of the Upper Susquehanna Project included the discovery of Early to Middle Archaic period occupation sites buried in the Susquehanna’s alluvial deposits.  Data on these periods had been almost unknown in New York and elsewhere, but the upper Susquehanna research was conducted around the same time as similar discoveries were being reported at stratified sites in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee (Chapman 1985; Dincauze 1971, 1976; McNett 1985).  This critical mass of new information stimulated considerable discussion and inter-regional comparison.  Another result was a clearer perspective of the question of Laurentian to Lamoka cultural sequence.  The delineation at several sites of the radiocarbon-dated Late Archaic to Early Woodland period stratigraphic sequence addressed this problem and allowed Bob to go farther in revising Ritchie’s original cultural sequence.  Also, reviewing this information and comparing it to the paleoclimatic reconstruction derived from Northeastern pollen records, Bob carefully considered the possibility that a cold and wet climatic downturn (and related changes in food resources) correlated with an apparent human population decline after the Late Archaic period, post-ca 3800 BP.  Since 1993 when Bob published his analysis of this issue, the same correlation has been observed in other regional archaeological data sets in the Northeast.  The significance of these correlations still merits consideration, especially as interest in the effects of ancient climate change on human populations has grown in recent years.

Some of Bob’s research projects that were smaller in scale followed his interests in Paleoindian, rockshelter, and chert quarry archaeology, typically conducted with Beth Wellman.  Some projects were collaborations with colleagues such as zoologist David Steadman in the re-assessment of the Dutchess Quarry Caves archaeology, fauna, and chronology; and archaeologist John Pfeiffer in the multi-year archaeological survey of Fishers Island, New York, work conducted in coordination with the Henry L. Ferguson Museum, Fishers Island.

As a senior scholar, Bob Funk was a prominent figure in Northeastern U.S. archaeology, providing chapters on the Northeast for Jesse Jenning’s book Ancient North Americans (Funk 1983 ) and the Smithsonian’s Handbook of North American Indians Volume 15, The Northeast (Funk1978 ).  His professional authority at times required turning an inquiring but skeptical eye to extraordinary claims, such as a ca. 70,000-year-old Paleolithic occupation in central New York’s glaciated terrain (Funk 1977), and the alleged Bronze or Iron Age, Celtic or Mediterranean origin of New England’s stone chambers.  Bob was known to say, “I’m from Missouri, literally,” to hint at the high standard of proof required with claims such as these.  An accomplished and recognized leader in New York State archaeological research, on multiple occasions his commentaries and publications provided the distinguished, New York State Archaeologist perspective on topics and issues in New England and Mid-Atlantic regional prehistory (for example, Funk 1984). 

Bob passed away unexpectedly in 2002, after which New York State Museum published the books he was working on posthumously.  These are Three Sixteenth-Century Mohawk Iroquois Village Sites (2003), co-authored with Robert D. Kuhn, and An Ice Age Quarry-Workshop:  The West Athens Hill Site Revisited (2004).  The latter volume includes new analyses and is an expansion of the 1973 West Athens Hill site report that appeared in Aboriginal Settlement Patterns in the Northeast.  To honor Bob’s memory and his many research contributions, his family and the archaeological community in New York State (including the New York Archaeological Council, the New York State Archaeological Association, and the New York State Museum) established the Robert E. Funk Memorial Archaeology Foundation to support research dedicated to New York State archaeology.  The first grants were awarded in 2004.