Larson, Lewis H., 1927-

Lewis H. Larson Jr. was born 24 January 1927 in Minnesota. He retired on 1 September 1998, bringing to a close more than fifty years of involvement in Georgia and Southeastern archaeology. He currently resides in Carrollton. Larson earned his B.A. degree in Anthropology from the University of Minnesota in 1949, his M.A. from the University of Michigan in 1952, and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1969. At various times during those years, he held teaching positions at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia State University, and Eastern Kentucky University and directed the archaeological program of the Georgia Historical Commission. At the time of his retirement, Larson was professor of anthropology at the University of West Georgia and state archaeologist for Georgia, a post he had held since 1972. He was director of UWG's Waring Archaeological Laboratory from 1988 until his retirement. During his long career, Larson conducted fieldwork throughout Georgia, but his greatest effort was focused on the Etowah site in northwestern Georgia and the Georgia coast. He often divided his year between these two areas, working on the coast in the winter and at Etowah in the summer. On the coast, Larson conducted extensive site survey, including a search for Spanish missions that lead eventually to the discovery of Mission Santa Gatalina de Guale on St. Catherines Island. Much of Larson's research was conducted within an ecological framework, and he was among the first to take this approach in the Southeast. In his most important contribution from this perspective, Aboriginal Subsistence Technology on the Southeastern Coastal Plain during the Late Prehistoric' Period (1980), he combined environmental, archaeological, and ethnohistorical data to reconstruct aboriginal adaptation to the south Atlantic Coast and coastal plain.