J.B. White

Credits & Sources

Archeologists from Prewitt and Associates, Inc., who led research at the J. B. White site. Eloise Gadus, shown at left with stake-setting mallet in hand during early stages of investigations, directed work at the site and is the author of this exhibit. Ross Fields, Principal Investigator, is president of Prewitt and Associates. Jennifer McWilliams, Project Archeologist, stands in a unit next to a sifting screen.

The J. B. White Site exhibit was created by Eloise Frances Gadus. Gadus is a research archeologist who has worked for Prewitt and Associates, Inc., for over 18 years. She is an expert in the prehistoric Native American societies of east Texas and the Gulf Coast. This interest grew out of her undergraduate research assistantship at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History of Ohio where she was introduced to the prehistory of the Southeastern United States. She also gained experience in the field of Cultural Resource Management by working for the University of West Florida at Pensacola in both Florida and Mississippi and from her graduate studies at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Gadus directed operations at the J. B. White site, and Jennifer McWilliams served as Project Archeologist. McWilliams, who has participated in historic and prehistoric archological projects in Belize, Ecuador, Peru, and Texas, holds a BA in Anthropology from Southwest Texas State University and MA in Anthropology from Texas Tech University. She has been with Prewitt and Associates., Inc., for the past five years.

Ross Fields is Principal Investigator for the J. B. White site project and co-author, with Gadus and Karl Kibler, of the forthcoming (2006) report detailing the results of their analysis of the site. Fields is President of Prewitt and Associates, Inc., an Austin-based firm that provides archeological and historical consulting services to federal and state agencies, local governments, private industry, and individuals. He holds bachelor's and master's degrees in anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin. Before joining Prewitt and Associates as a Staff Archeologist in 1981, he honed his archeological skills on a variety of projects in places such as east Texas, northeastern Oklahoma, southeastern Alaska, and the Four Corners region of the Southwest. Although he has worked on a variety of projects throughout Texas, his strongest research interests lie in east Texas, having been fostered by a 1975 field school with Dee Ann Story at Deshazo, a protohistoric Caddo hamlet west of Nacogdoches, and work in 1977 and 1980 at the George C. Davis site.

The Texas Department of Transportation sponsored the archeological investigations by Prewitt and Associates. This exhibit is a public-education component of those investigations. Preliminary work at the site was conducted by TxDOT archeologists Dr. Lain Ellis, Damon Crawford, Jim Abbott, and Steven Ahr. Testing was undertaken by archeologists from the Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Texas at San Antonio under the direction of Dr. Steve Tomka and Richard Mahoney.

TBH Co-Editor Susan Dial served as exhibit editor and, with Steve Black, contributed additional writing. Carol Schlenk, TBH Education Editor, wrote the Kids interactive section: Mussel Mania.  Web designer Josh Leong developed the exhibits and children’s interactive for the web. TBH Intern Heather Smith and former TBH web designer Meg Kemp assisted in web development and created image collages for the main and final sections of the exhibit. Dial created the other collages, using insets of paintings by Charles Shaw and Nola Davis.

All photographs used in the exhibit, unless otherwise specified, were taken by Prewitt and Associates photographers. Graphics were done by Sandy Hannum and Brian Wootan; Gadus drew the images for the children's mussel characters, "Shelly" and "Pearly." Images of mussels (underwater photos) were provided courtesy of U.S. Fish and Wildlife and the Pacific Northwest Native Freshwater Mussel Work Group www.fws.gov/columbiariver/musselwg.htm).