Arkansas Archeological Society member John Connaway received a prestigious award at the Southeastern Archaeological Conference in Tulsa earlier this month. John is an archeologist with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. SEAC presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award. The following testimonial accompanied the presentation. Congratulations!

“The second archaeologist we will honor tonight is John Connaway who is entering his 51st year working for the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. He has spent that time working out of the Clarksdale office and has done more work in the Yazoo Basin than any other single archaeologist. Many of the sites he has salvaged, Oliver, Austin, and Carson to name three of the most important, were threatened by modern agricultural practices. In all three of these examples, he mobilized a crew of volunteers including academic archaeologists, graduate students, avocational archaeologists, and field schools to conduct a remarkable amount of archaeology on a very small budget. When his volunteers can’t make it, he works alone. The resultant collections of carefully curated artifact assemblages and meticulous fieldnotes have provided material for two or three generations of graduate student theses. There are few archaeologists who know their region as well as John and nobody who is better at shovel shaving.”