12. Thomas Jefferson has been called the father of American archaeology, bringing the new academic discipline to his native land from Europe.
Thomas Jefferson wasn’t just the third President of the United States. The Virginia native was a true ‘Renaissance Man’. He loved knowledge and learning for the sake of learning. While he decided at an early age to pursue a career in law, almost wholly for financial reasons, Jefferson also loved the sciences, as well as history. He learned much on his travels through Europe, and brought his newly-acquired knowledge back to the Americas with him, including his knowledge of the emerging discipline of archaeology. Indeed, not for nothing is Jefferson sometimes called ‘the father of American archaeology’.
In 1784, Jefferson supervised the systematic excavation of an old Native American burial ground located on his land in Virginia. The methods he used were highly advanced for the time. So much so, in fact, that many of his contemporaries questioned the reason he was digging and cataloging his finds in the first place. Over the next few years and decades, a number of scientists would further develop the discipline of archaeology, though they remained faithful to the systematic digging methods first employed by Jefferson and his team. Several of the books the President wrote based on the findings of his digs, as well as the artifacts he unearthed, are still displayed in museums across the United States.