Betwixt and Between: Ethnoarchaeology, Women, Susan Kent
The gilded Marshalltown traditionally went to the guy dressed in faded khakis, eyes squinting in a weather-beaten face, pipe in hand, trowel in the belt (Flannery 1982:267). He dug square holes to get data. Frequently, there were a few young women in his crew, women who mostly worked steadily, eyes lowered as the guy in charge ogled down their halter-tops. Summer over, some of these women worked in the lab. Photographs of field crews named young men, but less often, women (e.g., Jennings 1994:145). Linguists distinguish between unmarked, or basic, categories and marked words, with qualifiers affixed to the basic morpheme. For example, ‘man’ is the unmarked, and ‘woman’ (derived from ‘wif-man,’ that is, wife-man) is the marked word. Similarly, ‘archaeology’ functions as the basic term and ‘ethnoarchaeology’ is the marked category. It follows that a woman doing ethnoarchaeology is special, outside the basic cognitive frame ‘archaeology.’ No woman pursuing ethnoarchaeology has been recognized in standard histories of the profession. This essay will center on Susan Kent, a person who was an indefatigable fieldworker, had an enviable list of significant articles and edited volumes at her early death at 50, served the profession in national organization offices, sparked many discussions with her cogent analyses and stimulating observations, and nurtured a number of younger scholars. Her operational method of doing ethnoarchaeology focused the subfield (David and Kramer 2001:11). To no avail when it came to appointment to larger research-supporting anthropology programs to which she applied, her accomplishments seemingly could not balance what hiring committees saw as a short, plump woman whose lectures at interviews failed to dispel the negative impression. Kent’s career illuminates how fundamental to Western societies is the unmarked ‘man’ standing for ‘human being.’ Our professional community had difficulty fitting the anomalous ‘woman’ ‘ethnoarchaeologist’ into its model of the discipline, exhibiting the androcentrism that can obfuscate substantial, illuminating contributions. The hallmark of Kent’s archaeological practice was her deep, empathetic engagement with non-Western communities. Her model of ethnoarchaeology contrasts with that of the New Archaeology ‘processual’ archaeologists avowedly pursuing ‘lawlike’ generalizations (O’Brien et al. 2005:101–103). Empathy with the people with whom she sat as a participant observer drove her to active concern with her communities’ complicated political issues, particularly about health. ethnoarchaeology, Vol. 5 No. 2, October, 2013, 112–118
Archaeological Ethnography in Western Iran, 1959-1960
The “Classics Review” is a new series that our journal is launching in this volume. The purpose of this section is to highlight ground-breaking scholars in ethnoarchaeology and experimental studies — those individuals and their research that have and continue to shape our discipline. Each volume will focus on one or two works. For instance, in this inaugural volume we present reviews on the important and early works of Patty Jo Watson and Carol Kramer. To make this interesting, we invited our noted scholars to provide perspective on their research as well as the opportunity to evaluate their work and the discipline in general. In addition, we have invited scholars to review the meaning and impact of these publications on their own research and broadly in the field.
Towards a Formalisation of Justification and Justifiability
We introduce the logic QKD S which is a normal multi-modal logic over finitely many modalities that additionally supports bounded quantification of modalities. An important feature of this logic is that it allows to quantify over the information components of systems and, hence, can be used to derive justifications. We compare the proposed logic with Artemov’s justification logic and also report on a prototypical implementation of a satisfiability solver of this logic and show some examples.