Roland B. Dixon was seen as an early proponent of this approach. In his presidential address to the American Anthropological Association he stated: “one would logically proceed to investigate a of sites of known ethnic affiliation, and work back from these,” because it “is only through the known that we can comprehend the unknown, only from a study of the present that we can understand the past.” Strong, who later became attributed to this particular methodology, argued that Dixon set forth the procedure of the direct historical approach. Strong would later go on to say that “once the archeological criteria of historically documented culture had been determined, it then possible to advance from the known and historic into the unknown and prehistoric.”