John Worth Faculty Homepage - Academic Background

Excavating an Apalachee jar at Mission San Joseph de Escambe, 2014

Academic Background

A native of northern Georgia, I began my archaeological training began in 1981 as a high school volunteer under the tutelage of Roy Dickens at Georgia State University in Atlanta (see photos of this and other projects), and continued between 1984-1988 at the University of Georgia in Athens with classes from David Hally and Stephen Kowalewski (including a field school with Chester DePratter at the University of South Carolina), from which I received my dual BA and MA in Anthropology. From 1988-1992 I attended graduate school at the University of Florida in Gainesville, with coursework from archaeologists Jerald Milanich, Kathleen Deagan, Brent Weisman, and William Keegan, from which I received my Ph.D. in Anthropology with an interdisciplinary focus in History (see below). My overall archaeological experience in school and subsequently has included survey, excavations, and labwork relating to sites in Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and Alabama, including Mississippian mounds, villages, and farmsteads, Late Archaic steatite quarries, Woodland-era shell middens and house-floors in Southwest Florida, a 16th-century Spanish colonial settlement, 17th- and 18th-century Spanish missions, a late 18th-century Cuban fishing camp, early 19th-century Cherokee and Creek farmsteads, an early 19th-century Creek Agency, and a mid 19th-century Seminole War fort.

My early ethnohistorical training, and also much of my anthropological theoretical orientation, originated with Charles Hudson at the University of Georgia, and continued at the University of Florida with the support of Jerald Milanich, as well as coursework with historians Michael Gannon and Murdo MacLeod, and archivist Bruce Chappell. My subsequent ethnohistorical experience has included extensive Spanish archival research during twelve trips to the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, as well as in the Archivo Historico Nacional and the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, the Archivo Nacional de Cuba in Havana, the Archivo General de la Nacion in Mexico City, as well as parish archives and other repositories in Spain, Cuba, and Mexico, concurrent with considerable research at the P.K. Yonge Library of Florida History at UF in Gainesville and most recently at the Department of Special Collections at UWF in Gainesville.

A full listing of my professional research publications and activities can be found in my C.V.

A selection of unpublished papers and older publications, as well as links to my books, can be found on my online publications page.

Just for the sake of nostalgia, a few photos from past projects are below: