Mildred Mott Wedel

Background

Mildred was born on September 7, 1912, in Marengo, Iowa, United States; the daughter of Frank Luther Mott and Vera (Ingram) Mott.

Education

Perhaps encouraged by her father, Mildred pursued advanced academic studies, completing her Bachelor of Arts degree in history from the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa, United States, in 1934. In 1938 she received a Master of Arts degree from the University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois, United States, where she was the first woman to receive a fellowship in anthropology.

Mildred's thesis, “The Relation of Historic Indian Tribes to Archaeological Manifestations in Iowa,” published in 1938 in the Iowa Journal of History and Politics, still stands as a classic example of the “direct historic approach” in archaeological methodology.

Career

When Mildred Mott entered anthropology in the 1930s, few women were employed professionally in the discipline. She was among the first academically trained archaeologists to work in Iowa. A major part of her research and publications dealt with the Ioway Indians and the Oneota archaeological complex. Of particular note are papers published in the Iowa Journal of History and Politics, Palimpsest, Journal of the Iowa Archeological Society, Plains Anthropologist, and the Smithsonian Institution’s Handbook of North American Indians. Other publications continued her interests in Oneota archaeology and the Chiwere Siouanspeaking peoples: Oneota Sites on the Upper Iowa River (1959) and Indian Villages on the Upper Iowa River (1961). In addition, she consulted with Living History Farms on their reconstruction of an Ioway Indian village as it might have looked in 1700 C.E.

During the summer of 1938, Mildred served as field director for archaeological excavations near Webster City, Iowa. That project is of historical interest because it was supervised by Charles R. Keyes, generally acknowledged as the founder of Iowa archaeology, and was financed by the Pulitzer Prize, winning novelist MacKinlay Kantor.

In 1939 Mildred Mott married Waldo R. Wedel, then assistant curator of archaeology at the U.S. National Museum and well on his way to becoming the preeminent scholar of plains archaeology. She assisted her husband in plains salvage archaeological projects into the 1960s. During that time, she also pursued her own research in ethnohistory and archaeology in addition to raising three children: Waldo M., Linda, and Frank. For many years she and her husband spent the summers writing up research at their cabin at the foot of Long’s Peak in Allenspark, Colorado.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Mildred Mott Wedel consulted with the Ioway and Oto Indians regarding their federal land claims suits. During that period and into the 1980s, she examined and retranslated texts from the French-colonial period, in particular, the journals of Jean-Baptiste Bénard, Sieur de La Harpe, and Claude-Charles Dutisné. Articles based on that research were published in the Great Plains Journal, Texas Memorial Museum Bulletin, Oklahoma Anthropological Society Memoirs, Louisiana Studies, and the Minnesota Historical Society’s memorial volume for Lloyd Wilford. She collaborated with her husband on research involving the ethnohistory and archaeology of the Wichita Indians. As part of that project, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers commissioned her to identify the tribal affiliation of the Native American inhabitants of north-central Oklahoma. That research was published as The Deer Creek Site, Oklahoma, A Wichita Village Sometimes Called Ferdinandina: An Ethnohistorian’s View (1981), The Wichita Indians in the Arkansas River Basin (1982), and The Wichita Indians 1541-1750: Ethnohistorical Essays (1988). Wedel’s expertise in both archaeology and ethnohistory is especially apparent in her articles in Ethnohistory: Its Payoffs and Pitfalls for Iowa Archaeologists (1976), The Ethnohistorical Approach to Caddoan Origins (1979), and, with Raymond DeMallie, The Ethnohistorical Approach in Plains Area Studies (1980).

Achievements

• Mildred was honored by the American Anthropological Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in Anthropology (1985), a day-long dedicatory symposium at the Plains Conference (1988). On October 6, 1995, a brick in honor of Mildred Mott Wedel was dedicated on the Plaza of Heroines in front of Iowa State University’s Carrie Chapman Catt Hall. Wedel died in Boulder, Colorado.

Works

• book

  • Oneota sites on the upper Iowa river 1959

Connections

In 1939 Mildred Mott married Waldo R. Wedel.

Father:

Frank Luther Mott

Frank was a journalist and director of the School of Journalism at the State University of Iowa.

Mother:

Vera (Ingram) Mott

Spouse:

Waldo R. Wedel

References

• The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa Iowa has been blessed with citizens of strong character who have made invaluable contributions to the state and to the nation. In the 1930s alone, such towering figures as John L. Lewis, Henry A. Wallace, and Herbert Hoover hugely influenced the nation’s affairs.
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