Profile of Bruce D. Smith

Archaeology today is a very different field for Bruce D. Smith, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History (Washington, DC), than it was in 1965, when he took his first college course in the subject. Although he started his career excavating 1,000-year-old sites in Missouri, today Smith uncovers long-curated collections scattered in the massive archived holdings of the Smithsonian and other museums. He has traded in his shovel and trowel for modern tools such as accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) radiocarbon dating, scanning electron microscopy, and ancient DNA analysis.

Trained under researchers who helped overturn old paradigms, Smith has used many of the basic tenets of the “New Archaeology” to structure his research on pre-Columbian societies in the Americas. He started out studying the post-A.D. 1000 Mississippian chiefdoms of eastern North America, investigating their hunting and farming economies, political and spatial organization, and factors important in their initial evolution. More recently, as part of the Smithsonian Institution's Archaeobiology Program, Smith has focused on improving the understanding of the temporal and cultural contexts of plant domestication and the transition from hunting-gathering to agriculture in the New World.

In his Inaugural Article published in this issue of PNAS (1), Smith revisits one of the most extensive and detailed early records of human cultural history in Mesoamerica. Smith reanalyzed plant remains from the Coxcatlan Cave in Puebla, Mexico, which was occupied by humans over a span of nearly 10,000 years. By using AMS radiocarbon dating and current biological knowledge of domestication and taxonomy, his results reveal which areas of the cave had intact deposits and which had been disturbed. Together with previous analyses of four other caves in Mexico, the findings show temporal and geographical trends in the initial domestication and early spread of many major American crops.