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“Shovel Ready” illustrates the little-known role that ordinary citizens played in excavation and archaeology during the Great Depression.
As a response to the Great Depression in the 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt created a number of work relief programs under his New Deal to put unemployed men and women to work. The goal of these federally funded work relief programs was to put people to work quickly, so funds were directed to projects that could get started very quickly—thus, they were shovel ready. Archaeology projects, of course, were literally shovel ready, as shovels are used regularly to move soil during the excavation process. Incidentally, on some projects, workers had to bring their own tools, including shovels, as work relief funding focused on meeting labor costs.
