Adrien Hannus

The son of a French chef, Dr. Adrien Hannus was born in Wichita, Kansas. During the Vietnam conflict, Adrien served as a lieutenant in military intelligence, where he worked with the CIA on counter-insurgency operations. After receiving his M.A. in Anthropology from Wichita State University and his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Utah, Adrien devoted his talents to working in the Great Plains region for almost 30 years, and also conducted archeological field projects in Egypt and Mexico. He has been involved in excavations at the Neanderthal cave site of Coudoulous in southern France and recently oversaw completion of the "Archeodome," a new state-of-the-art research and teaching facility that allows excavation to be conducted year-round at the Mitchell Prehistoric Indian Village in South Dakota. Fascinated by the theory of Early Man's migration into the Americas across the Bering Strait, Adrien has heavily researched and written about Early Man in the New World, Communal Land Mammal Hunting and Butchering and Man and Culture in the Pleistocene.

Video Profile

Time Team Q&A

Best Find
The Clovis points and bone tools associated with a mammoth kill/butchering location called the Lange/Ferguson site. I excavated the site over a three year period (1980-1983). The site was located on a ranch within the White River Badlands of South Dakota.

Secret Dig Kit Weapon
My recently added knee pads! A real MUST for every archaeologist!! Having just endured the pain of two total knee replacements, I now tell my students that, cool or not, knee pads should be standard equipment. The other secret weapon is a square ended trowel. I used a pointing trowel for many years, but "discovered" the square ended trowels in the early 1980's. Since that time I have become a 'true believer' in this shape of Marshalltown trowels. For both walls and floors, this configuration is excellent. Bring on the 'trowel wars'!!!!

Favorite Site
Certainly the Lange/Ferguson site. My special focus in North American archaeology is the early peopling of the New World. Lange/Ferguson is a Clovis site at which two of the ice age mammoths were killed and butchered about 12,000 years ago. The site not only yielded several Clovis points, but also provided the best evidence yet recovered in the New World for a bone tool industry associated with the Clovis culture. Tools were recovered in the bone bed which documented that the Clovis hunters were fabricating tools by flaking sections of the long bone of the mammoths as part of the butchering process. These flaked bone tools provided the hunters with sharp and easily discarded cutting tools, thus reducing the need for stone tools.

When did you first know you wanted to be an archaeologist?
My first strong attraction was when I visited the Field Museum in Chicago and at age 8 got to meet several of the paleontologists. They allowed me to glue a small fragment of fossil bone onto a leg of a duck-billed creature that was being prepared for exhibit. When I was 14 these same individuals allowed me to join in a several day excavation of fossil materials on the outskirts of Chicago. I strayed away from archaeology as an undergraduate and got my B.A. in Political Science. However after a year in Law School and a 'Sunny South East Asian Vacation Package' courtesy of the government, I reset my thinking following my Army stint and went back to graduate school in Anthropology. The rest as they say... "is history".