Great Plains Studies, Center for
Review of What This Awl Means: Feminist Archaeology at a Wahpeton Dakota Village by Janet D. Spector
Date of this Version
1995
Abstract
Spector provides the basic information needed to help general readers understand the site and its people. She also does more, offering thoughtful reflections on issues that she has faced as a professional archaeologist and on the ethical problems that confront the field, given its past lack of communication and dialogue with the peoples whose histories it has excavated and appropriated.
This book may break the trail for a new genre of archaeological site report. Reading it, I was led to reflect on my own first summer field school experience, and on the report that our director ultimately published. I recall vividly the human experience of those ten weeks, the intense hands-on learning and immersion in an entirely fresh subject. It was exciting, and the crew all felt like equals, pursuing a common goal. But no Native people appeared on-site (to our knowledge) or in the report. Its author, unlike Spector, would not have thought to list all his field crews by name at the end. And his acknowledgments too reflected his times; a long list of names followed by thanks to "all of these gentlemen." I left the field of archaeology. I am glad that Janet Spector did not.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 15:3 (Summer 1995). Copyright © 1995 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.