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201 Introduction I did not know Walter Taylor personally but did meet him near the beginning of his career (1955) during a materials-analysis conference at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago. Taylor had organized that conference and subsequently published the proceedings (Taylor 1957b). As a pre-M.A. graduate student in Near Eastern prehistory at the time, with comprehensive exams looming before me, I did not carry away detailed memories of him or the conference. The only other personal encounters between us were in 1974 at his retirement seminar, held on the Southern Illinois University campus, and in 1993 at the Washington University faculty club during a luncheon hosted by Nicholas Demerath, professor of sociology at Washington University and a long-time friend of Taylor’s. Not only did I not know Taylor well, but also I did not even read A Study of Archeology until several years after finishing graduate school. It was not on the reference lists for my curriculum in Old World archaeology at the University of Chicago in the 1950s. When I began teaching a seminar in archaeological theory in 1969, however, I assigned Taylor’s book (then available in a paperback reprinting by SIU Press). Like everyone else who reads it, the seminar students and I wondered why his critique of Americanist archaeology in Chapter 3 is so strong, Walter W. Taylor’s A Study of Arch(a)eology Its Impact, or Lack Thereof, 1943–Present Chapter thirteen Patty Jo Watson Patty Jo Watson 202 and why his attack on A.V. Kidder is so much longer and so much more detailed than what he had to say about anyone else. Taylor’s discussion of Kidder’s published work occupies twenty-one pages, two and a half times more space than that devoted to Griffin, and five to seven times more space than Taylor expends on the four other archaeologists whom he specifically criticizes: Haury, Ritchie, Roberts, and Webb. Hence, one mystery about A Study of Archeology centers on Chapter 3, “An Analysis of Americanist Archeology in the United States.” Why did he include those personal attacks in his dissertation? Why did his committee allow him to include them? Equally difficult to understand is why he retained the ad hominem detail in the published version of his dissertation, and why the publishers1 permitted it, especially the lengthy, destructive analysis of A. V. Kidder’s work. Was this to be blamed in part on one of Taylor’s dissertation advisors, Clyde Kluckhohn? Perhaps Taylor was following a trail blazed by Kluckhohn (1940) in his critique of Middle American archaeology (Bennett 1998: 300, 307; Reyman 1999: 683, 687). Another possibility is that Taylor’s independent income and his wartime triumphs underwrote the cockiness and arrogance that some of his colleagues noticed in that late 1940s to early 1950s period (e.g., Woodbury 1954). In any case, the question remains, what motivated Taylor to commit social and political suicide within the Americanist archaeological community and to engender life-long enmity in several of its most prominent members? Another mystery emerges from an observation made in June 1996 at Harvard’s Tozzer Library,when I first saw the carbon copy of Taylor’s dissertation. According to the Tozzer Library card catalog, Taylor turned in his dissertation on February 12, 1943. There are several noticeable differences between the 1943 dissertation and the revised manuscript that was published in 1948, one being the dissertation’s long subtitle:“A Study of Archaeology2 : A Dialectical, Practical, and Critical Discussion with Special Reference to American Archaeology and the Conjunctive Approach.” Contrary to what I had assumed originally—that the published version of the critique would have been toned down from the dissertation version—the reverse is actually the case. The published version is more combative and longer than the dissertation version, especially the section on Kidder. Taylor added several printed-pages’ worth of negative discussion concerning archaeological work carried out in the Maya area by the Carnegie Institution’s Division of Historical Research, chaired by Kidder from 1929 to 1950. Allan Maca (Chapter 16, this volume) introduces the cogent suggestion that Taylor’s motivation in criticizing Kidder may have been different from that which impelled him to point out theoretical and methodological inadequacies in the work of other contemporary archaeologists. Because Kidder was chair of a powerful entity that dominated Maya archaeology for decades, Taylor’s negative evaluation in A Study of Archeology was directed not just at an individual [3.128.203...

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