On a visit to the site one weekend we found a few artifacts in the spoil dirt from a vandal's excavation: some thin, shell-tempered sherds, a Rice side-notched point, and two Euro-American trade brooches of white metal. One afternoon Rolland told me of a group of rock-and-earth mounds on a hill in Benton County, near the town of Fairfield and not far from the confluence of the Pomme de Terre and the Osage rivers.
He became an eager and fast-learning field archaeologist and soon became a valued member of the division. At the time, Rolland was picking a guitar in a Springfield, Mo., night club, but the opportunity to be paid for what he had done for years–look for artifacts–was too great a temptation to resist. Whereas I trudged the fields alone through that spring and summer, I gained a field assistant later that season: Rolland E. Chapman had hired me to do an archaeological survey of the Pomme de Terre Reservoir, then under construction. I first came to work at the University of Missouri as a research associate for the Division of Archaeological Research, appropriately enough, on April Fools day, 1957. The discovery of this artifact was an exciting event, but its subsequent history provides instructive lessons in the interpretation of prehistory. Pangborn) was the subject of the cover art. The discovery of this icon was told coldly and dispassionately in two versions in The Pomme de Terre Reservoir in Western Missouri Prehistory (Wood 1961:29), in which the gorget served as the cover art and, later, in an expanded publication, The Fristoe Burial Complex of Southwestern Missouri (Wood 1967:20), in which its co-finder (Rolland E. One former anthropology graduate student even has a replica of the feline tattooed on his right bicep. It even inspired, subliminally at least, the acronym PUMA for the department's 1995 student publication, Publications of the University of Missouri Anthropologists.
Its image has adorned Missouri Archaeological Society broadsides and other publications for years and has been a favorite logo for the University of Missouri's anthropology department. Perhaps only a few readers of the MAS Quarterly will recall the Fairfield Mound group, but every individual who has been involved in Missouri's prehistory will recognize its most recognizable artifact: the jaguar gorget from the Fairfield Mound 2 (Figure 1). Missouri Archaeological Society Quarterly
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