Madeline Kneberg joined UT in 1938 to direct the newly established archaeology laboratory charged with analysis of the Indian artifacts and remains excavated from sites anticipated to be flooded by the TVA lake system. She also served as a faculty member, beginning to teach anthropology in 1940. By age 21, she had been an aspiring singer and had spent four years in Florence, Italy, exploring art and music and had decided not to pursue a career in singing. She returned to Chicago in 1928 to enroll in the School of Nursing at Presbyterian Hospital. After graduation she continued her studies at the University of Chicago, majoring in sociology and minoring in psychology. She had intended to pursue a career in medicine but was persuaded to pursue physical anthropology instead. She completed the requirements for a doctorate except for the dissertation.
Until the Works Progress Administration was dissolved in 1942, she managed 30 to 40 individuals involved in processing and analyzing enormous quantities of archaeological materials. She and Thomas M. N. Lewis developed and published a detailed laboratory procedures manual that included an attribute-based classification system, techniques for pottery reconstruction, and a system for collections management. As a physical anthropologist, Kneberg examined and classified over two thousand skeletal remains.
Lewis and Kneberg were dedicated to educating the layperson about archaeology, an emphasis manifested in the creation of the Tennessee Archaeological Society in 1944. The society’s journal, Tennessee Archaeologist, was to be “instrumental in arousing a new interest in the state’s prehistory, and in encouraging a state-wide cooperation.” In the 1950s Kneberg was active in the planning and construction of the Oconoluftee Indian Village in Cherokee, North Carolina. The reconstructed eighteenth-century Cherokee village employed many Cherokee craftspeople in the revival and promotion of traditional arts.
Kneberg was a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Science, and both she and Thomas M. N. Lewis authored many articles (mostly together) and made, surely, thousands of speeches and appearances. In 1961 shortly after the completion of the Frank H. McClung Museum, she and Thomas M. N. Lewis were married and retired to Florida.