Mildred Mott Wedel: Iowa Time Machine

Iowa Time Machine ⏰: On October 6, 1995, a brick honoring Mildred Mott Wedel was dedicated on Iowa State University’s Plaza of Heroines, outside Carrie Chapman Catt Hall. The small marker commemorated a scholar whose work helped Iowans read a much larger landscape: the archaeological traces, Native nations, colonial records, and living histories that connect the state’s deep past to the present.

Wedel’s path to that recognition began in Marengo, Iowa, where she was born on September 7, 1912, to journalist and University of Iowa School of Journalism director Frank Luther Mott and Vera Ingram Mott. She earned a history degree from the University of Iowa in 1934 and completed an anthropology master’s degree at the University of Chicago in 1938, becoming the first woman to receive an anthropology fellowship there.

Wedel became one of Iowa’s first academically trained archaeologists as the discipline developed new methods for linking excavated materials with Indigenous history. Her 1938 master’s thesis, “The Relation of Historic Indian Tribes to Archaeological Manifestations in Iowa,” became a landmark application of the direct historical approach. By bringing archaeological evidence into conversation with documentary and ethnographic sources, she explored connections between historic Ioway and Oto peoples and the Oneota archaeological tradition.

Across more than six decades, she studied the Ioway, Oto, Wichita, and Oneota sites, Plains ethnohistory, and French colonial-era sources. Her work with the Ioway and Oto on federal land-claims cases demonstrated that historical research could carry consequences outside academic publishing. As a Smithsonian research associate from 1974, she also modeled an interdisciplinary practice that joined archaeology, written records, language, and consultation with Native communities. Her career received major professional recognition, including the Iowa Archaeological Society’s Keyes/Orr Award in 1980 and the Plains Anthropological Society’s lifetime-achievement Distinguished Service Award in 1992. #Iowa #OTD #History #Archaeology #IndigenousHistory