The Road from Frijoles Canyon: Anthropolitical Adventures on Four Continents

10: European Connections

300 Chapter 10 European Connections n E uropean countries sent a large number of expeditions to participate in the High Dam campaign in Nubia, and their experience in time served as a launching platform for the new field of Nubian Studies, or Nubiology as it is occasionally called. Today there are university chairs and degree programs in Sweden, Norway, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy, and possibly others that I’m not aware of. Expeditions from most of those countries are, or recently have been, at work in the Sudan; their directors often enough began their careers as students on the High Dam digs. The International Society for Nubian Studies, wholly dominated by Europeans, meets quadrennially in one of the major European cities, as does the Meroitic Studies Conference.1 Major research journals devoted to Nubia and the Sudan are published in Britain, France, Germany, and Poland. For a variety of reasons, there has been no comparable development in the United States, which for the past forty years has been all but unrepresented in the Nubian field. There has been no real carryover or continuity from the High Dam digs, for many of the scholars and institutions that came to take part at that time were attracted only by the funding offered by the U.S. State Department and never developed any enduring interest in the region. Indeed, the only expedition organized in the time of the High Dam campaign that is still active is the Combined Prehistoric Expedition, but its activities are now almost entirely in the Egyptian deserts, not in Nubia in the narrower sense. The major stumbling block for American archaeologists is, as usual, that of funding. The two main sources of funds to which the archaeologists can apply are the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the European Connections 301 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), but both impose conditions that are not well suited for work in Nubia. NSF projects must have a specific problem focus, capable of resolution or at least clarification in no more than three years. However, the most productive results in Nubian archaeology have always been obtained from long-term, open-ended excavation programs such as are funded by many European institutions. In addition, much of the work on later Nubian sites is identified as “historical” rather than “scientific” and as such is ineligible for NSF funding. The NEH for its part is clearly amenable to historical research; the difficulty with this institution is that it requires the applicant to provide matching funds, which in the case of Nubian work are hard to come by. It is inevitable, in these circumstances, that for the past twenty years my research associations have been almost entirely European. During that time I have published only one Nubia-related article in the United States, whereas I have published articles or monographs in no fewer than twelve European countries. Many of my European connections have come about as an unexpected consequence of my early pottery studies. Once my initial classifications had been published,2 I was already the “acknowledged expert” on medieval Nubian pottery, and several of the European expeditions invited me to look over their sherd collections and offer my opinions. In later years these informal consultations gave way to more formal studies, when I was engaged at various times to analyze and write up the medieval pottery collections at Stavanger (Norway), Helsinki, Berlin, and Cambridge, as well as at the French Oriental Institute in Cairo. English Connections This memoir would surely be incomplete without a consideration of the enormous role that Great Britain, her institutions and her people, have played, especially in the latter phases of my career. So much of my work has been published in England, and so close has been my association with the British Museum, that younger colleagues who don’t know me personally sometimes assume that I’m English. In one sense, my English connection has been lifelong, part of my family heritage. My grandfather and my mother had both been to school in England in their youth, and my father had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. All three of them spoke of English places and people as familiarly as they would of New York or Oregon. Consequently we C h a p t e r 1 0 302 boys, though we knew that Britain was not part of the United States, never thought of...