Commemorative Volumes in Archaeology and the (Preclassical) Southern Levant

In their discussion of scholarly social networks within Aegean excavation and survey projects, Grace Erny and Melanie Godsey consider a number of factors that, taken together, are shown to disadvantage women—particularly graduate students and junior scholars. These scholarly networks are often conceived of as genealogies or "family" trees. Implicit in this formulation is the idea that the hierarchies that structure academia and fieldwork projects transcend professionalism; rather, they verge on the familial, with all the emotionally deep expectations that "family" evokes. Perhaps in archaeology, more than in most academic disciplines, this personalization is appropriate since fieldwork requires long-term social intimacy and physical proximity in ways that most disciplines do not. I would suggest that one reason the egregious breaches of equity well documented by Erny and Godsey, and by many others, reverberate profoundly in our field is due to our expectations of "familial" evenhandedness. Despite our awareness of deep-seated realities, none of us wants to be part of a relationship in which, for example, Dad (or Doktorvater) prefers his sons (or male colleagues and students) to his daughters (or female colleagues and students). And yet, of course, here we are.¹

My contribution to Erny and Godsey's investigation primarily concerns an ongoing research project that I began some years ago, which looks at commemorative volumes (Festschriften and memorials) in Near Eastern and Egyptian archaeology.² I focus on books published in English, although some volumes include articles in other languages as well. All contain articles that engage with material culture and excavated texts from preclassical periods; however, the range of articles in some volumes makes it impossible to be overly rigid in adhering to these criteria. Amanda Bauer has contributed to this project in important ways, and we jointly presented the preliminary results of our work at ASOR's annual meeting in 2018 (Bauer and Nakhai 2018). I acknowledge Amanda's important contribution to this project, and I thank her for it.³ All data discussed here are preliminary and subject to change.

First, a few comments about the nature of the commemorative volume are in order. Those scholars who conceptualize, initiate, and edit commemorative volumes are the ones who determine which other scholars, among a larger cohort of colleagues, are "truly" part of the commemorated person's network. Sometimes editors put together commemoratives under the veil of secrecy; other times, honorees are aware of the effort being made on their behalf. In either case, those to whom the editors extend invitations form a collegial network, a cohort of publicly acknowledged insiders. Of course, just as editors select those scholars to whom they will extend invitations, they also deem other scholars unworthy of inclusion and thereby eliminate them from their newly created cohort of "insiders." Whether honorees concur with editors' choices is a moot point.

Festschriften, which originated in Germany late in the nineteenth century, were first published in the United States in the 1930s but remained uncommon in the US throughout much of the twentieth century. It was not until the 1990s that Festschriften became popular in archaeology and across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Of the more than 150 commemorative volumes honoring people working in the archaeology of the southern Levant that were published between 1908 and 2018, fewer than 10 percent honored women; the first English-language commemorative to honor a woman working in this field was only published in the late 1970s. In the decade between 2008 and 2018, women edited or co-edited about one-third the number of commemoratives that men edited or co-edited, but they contributed less than one-third the number of articles that men contributed. In that same decade, despite the growing number of women leading excavations and holding tenure-track or tenured positions, women were honored with barely fourteen percent of commemorative volumes.⁴ Memorial volumes remain much less common than Festschriften; the first memorial volume dedicated to a woman in this field was published more than a century after the first memorial volume dedicated to a man.

As a point of comparison, we can look at the...