A Place Remembered

A Place Remembered Raymond H. Thompson Historian Curtis Hinsley and archaeologist David Wilcox have greatly enriched Southwestern studies through their admirable reporting on the Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition of the 1880s in this journal and in Southwest Center books (Hinsley and Wilcox 1995, 1996, 2002). They remind us of “the continuing dialogue over the last century between Boston and the Southwest, and the important legacy we have all inherited” (Wilcox 1995: 525). Now comes archaeologist Hester Davis with her stunning new book, Remembering Awatovi, to provide us with a fascinating example of an enduring New England–Southwest connection that took place a half century after the Hemenway Expedition (Davis 2008). She gives us a sparkling account of the now-legendary Awatovi Expedition of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology of Harvard University from 1935 to 1939. She calls it “the last and largest of the Peabody’s pre–World War II expeditions” (p. xix), but it can also be viewed as the first of the big projects of modern Southwestern archaeology. The agenda for the modern period was created by 1930 out of the tensions of the period between the Hemenway and Awatovi expeditions (Snead 2001). Her story is a powerful evocation of the importance of place and the nature of the connections between places. Although Hinsley and Wilcox are mainly concerned with the intellectual impact of the Hemenway Expedition, Davis reminds us in many delightful ways that these expeditions have important social as well as intellectual consequences. At this point, although I was not a member of that expedition and have never even visited Awatovi, it seems appropriate for me to offer what serious journalists call a disclosure. I am a New Englander, though definitely not of Byrkit’s (1992) baronial variety, born in Maine a decade before the Awatovi Expedition, raised during the Depression in that Raymond Harris Thompson retired in 1997 as director of the Arizona State Museum and Fred A. Riecker Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. He is an editorial advisor for Journal of the Southwest. Journal of the Southwest 52, 1 (Spring 2010) : 115–123 116  ✜  Journal of the Southwest farthest northeast corner of our country, educated in the Boston area at Tufts and Harvard, and fully indoctrinated in the view that Boston is the Athens of America. At the same time, I have spent most of my adult life and have carried out most of my archaeological fieldwork in the Southwest, especially in Arizona, where I have enjoyed four decades of teaching in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Arizona and six decades of marriage to the daughter of an Arizona rancher. However, I discount any possible influence from my life history on my views. I derive much of my appreciation of the Southwest and my recognition of the connections between it and New England from the many distinguished authors who have helped to define and elucidate these places in the pages of the Journal of the Southwest (JSW). When Joseph Wilder became its editor in 1987 he identified JSW as “a comprehensive publication with a special consciousness of space” and further declared that “it is the peculiar ambition of JSW to pay special attention to the histories of tradition and change which so define this unique region” (Wilder 1987: 2). Through the years he has published many and varied contributions to that definition and more recently his own insightful comments on place in the fiftieth-anniversary issue of JSW, even drawing from his talented daughter by including her perceptive essay about being “the children of our landscape” (Wilder and Wilder 2008: 475). Having thus absolved myself of any sins of bias or prejudice, I return to Hester Davis, herself a daughter of New England, whose friendship and collegiality I have enjoyed for many years (Thompson 1997). Granddaughter of pioneer geomorphologist William Morris Davis, raised on her father’s apple farm in Massachusetts, and educated at Rollins College, that oasis of New England probity in sybaritic Florida, she has spent most of her professional career with the Arkansas Archeological Survey at the University of Arkansas. She has been a major player in the development of the nation...