Patty Watson

Patty Jo Watson was the Edward Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Archaeology in the Department of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. She earned a master’s degree in anthropology in 1956 and a Ph.D. in 1959 from the University of Chicago, with a dissertation on early village farming in the Levant. Joining the Washington University faculty in 1969, she became a founding member of the Anthropology Department, twice served as its chair, developed the archaeology laboratory in McMillan Hall, and retired in 2004 as Edward Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities.

Watson's research explored prehistoric subsistence, technology, economy, and environment through processualist archaeology and ethnoarchaeology. Early fieldwork in Iraq, Iran, and Turkey under Robert J. Braidwood investigated Near Eastern prehistory and agricultural origins. In the 1960s, she initiated projects in Salts Cave within Mammoth Cave National Park, Kentucky, later expanding to western Kentucky rock shelters, shell mounds, and New Mexico sites. She pioneered flotation techniques for processing archaeological samples, revolutionizing paleobotanical analysis and understanding of Eastern North American horticulture, including the Eastern Horticultural Complex of chenopodium, sumpweed, sunflower, and maygrass. Watson co-authored seminal works such as Explanation in Archeology: An Explicitly Scientific Approach (1971) with Steven A. LeBlanc and Charles L. Redman, Archaeology of the Mammoth Cave Area (1974), Archaeological Ethnology in Western Iran (1979), Of Caves and Shell Mounds (1996) with Kenneth Carstens, and Archaeology of the Middle Green River Region, Kentucky (2005) with William H. Marquardt. Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1988 and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, she received the Fryxell Medal for Interdisciplinary Research from the Society for American Archaeology, the Distinguished Service Award from the American Anthropological Association, the Gold Medal for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement and Pomerance Award from the Archaeological Institute of America, and the Peter H. Raven Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Science St. Louis. Watson mentored numerous students, taught courses on archaeological theory and field methods, and contributed to editorial roles including editor of American Antiquity.