The Road from Frijoles Canyon: Anthropolitical Adventures on Four Continents

11: Si monumentum requiris . . .

323 Chapter 11 Si monumentum requiris . . . n C hristopher Wren, the architect of St. Paul’s Cathedral, is buried under the vault of the magnificent edifice that he created. His epitaph reads simply, si monumentum requiris circumspice —if you seek his monument, look around you. Not many of us have a chance to create anything so monumental, but I think most of us would hope to achieve something, in words or in deeds, by which we’ll be remembered after we’re gone. Here, by way of conclusion, are a few of the things for which I would like to be remembered. The Deed If there is any one deed for which I’d like to be remembered, it would have to be the single-handed excavation of the Meinarti mound, in 1963–64 (chapter 6). Among the great stratified tells of the Near East there have been a good many excavations by trenching or pitting, but I don’t know of any other that has been systematically stripped, level by level, so as to reveal the town plan at each level. Excavated in that fashion , Meinarti has presented a continuous, 1,400-year social history, a record of growth and decline, of good times and bad times, as has no other site to my knowledge. That, to me, is a lot of what townsite excavation should be about. For this achievement I don’t claim sole credit, for I have to give a propersharetotheSudanAntiquitiesService.Idoubtifanyotherexcavator of a mound has ever enjoyed the total infrastructural support that I had at Meinarti, enabling me to be 100 percent archaeologist. C h a p t e r 1 1 324 The Written Word A numerical tally of my publications, according to subject matter, is given in Appendix C. As can be seen, they are pretty numerous, and embrace a considerable variety of scholarly fields. In most though not all of them, I can single out one work for which I would like especially to be remembered. They are, for the most part, works of general synthesis , building on decades of earlier and more particularized work. Southwestern Ethnology My chefd’oeuvre in this area is clearly my dissertation, Shonto,aStudyof the Role of the Trader in a Modern Navaho Community.1 To my knowledge there are at least eight memoirs published by Navajo traders or their wives, but Shonto stands out among them with considerable distinctness because it is a detailed scholarly analysis, not a set of reminiscences . It is the only book of any kind, so far as I know, that presents a dollars-and-cents analysis not only of the Navajo family economy but also of the trading post economy. And among the rather numerous Navajo community studies, it is very much the most comprehensive, presenting social and economic data for every one of the 568 individuals living within an area of nearly five hundred square miles. In its time, the 1960s and 1970s, Shonto was sometimes called a classic. A reviewer in American Anthropologist wrote, “It reads like a thesis, but it is a thesis that the reviewer would have been proud to write.”2 The book evidently attracted a certain amount of notice overseas , for a Norwegian colleague told me that it had been discussed by Frederik Barth in a seminar at the University of Bergen. And when I was later introduced to Raymond Firth, and mentioned the book by way of self-identification, he said, “Oh—you’re that Adams.” And yet it is, today, no more than a snapshot of a vanished era. The present-day visitor to the Navajo Reservation will find nothing like the Navajo society or economy that is described in its pages, nor will he or she find a genuine trading post, apart from the one that is artificially preserved at the Hubbell National Monument. I’m told that today something like 40 percent of Navajos speak no Navajo. When I was trading at Shonto there was no one in that category, and more than half the adult community spoke nothing else. What surviving value the book has is archival. But I like to think, in this connection, that it is a true portrait of the last generation of Navajos who were content to be just that; to live without complaint in dirt-floored hogans without running water or electricity because it was the way the Holy People had ordained. Si...