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Reviews
| Thirty Years into Yesterday: A History of Archaeology at Grasshopper Pueblo. By Jefferson Reid and Stephanie Whittlesey. Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 2005. xx+268 pp., maps, illus., refs., bibl., index. $16.95 pb (ISBN 0-8165-2401-7), $35.00 hb (ISBN 0-8165-2402-5).
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On first seeing this volume on SIA's listing of books for review, I thought it must be some sort of mistake. SIA does not usually do prehistory. Then I noticed that one of the authors was Jefferson Reid, who was a fellow graduate student at Chapel Hill. The last time I saw him was when we drove (in his brand new Corvette) to Santa Fe for the Society for American Archaeology meetings in 1968. It was our introduction to Southwestern archaeological sites.
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With that disclaimer, this book should be required reading for any archaeologist contemplating a multiyear excavation at any kind of site. The Grasshopper Pueblo was originally occupied during the 1300s and was a large masonry structure not greatly different from the still-occupied Taos Pueblo in New Mexico. Located in a relatively remote part of the Fort Apache reservation in central Arizona, Grasshopper was the site of one of the largest and longest excavations in the United States. It is also one of the best documented, with a half-dozen books written about it, not to mention two dozen dissertations, nine master thesis, and at least a hundred book chapters and journal articles in print.
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This book, however, tells very little about what was found. It does describe how the excavation was organized, funded, staffed, and, most importantly, how the intellectual framework that drove the project shifted over 30 years.
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When the project began in 1963 under Raymond Thompson, most, if not all, archaeologists were mainly interested in cultural history. Their work plans were focused on developing cultural sequences and cultural areas based on artifacts, preferably broken pots. It was also nice to learn about what kind of dwellings their subjects had and what they ate. By using ethnological analogies, one might deduce something about social organization, but the range of cultural variation was so vast that this was considered risky.
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Thompson established the field camp at Grasshopper and set the format for the work that would be followed for the next 30 years. Financial support from the National Science Foundation allowed for a paid staff of archaeologists and support personnel. The 20 or so field schools' students received room and board and a small stipend. The annual fieldwork season ran for eight weeks, starting in mid-June.
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In 1966 William Longacre took over as director and introduced processual or "new" archaeology, as it was then called, to Grasshopper. The archaeologists were still looking for answers to culture history questions, but new questions about social processes were added. To answer questions about how an extinct society was organized and how that organization patterned its behavior, archaeologists needed more and different data. To get more data, they created more forms. The forms for the 16 rooms excavated in the first two years at Grasshopper fit in a single three-ring binder. After 1965 the forms for each room would fill a binder. Now archaeologists not only recorded the type of a recovered potsherd but also, where possible, the size and shape of the vessel, with the hope that this data would lead to an understanding of the function of the room in which it was found.
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To better control their selections of rooms to excavate, the supervising archaeologists initiated the cornering project, which would continue for more than a decade. They established the relative dates of construction of the 500 or so rooms in the Grasshopper Pueblo by making small excavations in diagonally opposite corners of rooms to check for bonding between adjacent walls. This allowed for the definition of construction units, some of which appeared also to be household units. In 1969 they hired local Apaches to assist with the excavation, a practice that would continue for the duration of the project.
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Jefferson Reid joined the project in 1970 as an assistant director. For most of the next eight years, he oversaw the fieldwork while Longacre was in charge of the project. At first Reid tried to embrace processual archaeology but soon realized its limitations and turned to behavioral archaeology, which assumes that archaeological deposits are least in part the result of human behavior and that one can determine past behavioral patterns by careful excavation and collection of lots of data. If you look at enough patterns and how a society is organized, how it reacts to external changes might become visible. To better understand the context of the Grasshopper site, archaeologists began a systematic survey of the surrounding area and conducted excavations of some nearby sites dating from the same period.
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In 1979 Reid took over as project director, a post he held for the next 14 years, until excavation ended at Grasshopper. During that period, financial support became more elusive, and the students had to pay their own ways. More staff time had to be devoted to teaching as more undergraduates participated.
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The amount of information the Grasshopper project generated is staggering, especially considering that the largest computer available to civilians had one megabyte of RAM when participants in the project first started to computerize the data. The Grasshopper database took decades to develop. It should also be noted that in the Southwest it is possible with dendrochronology to date prehistoric sites and structures with nearly the same precision as historic sites in the rest of the country
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| As archaeological books go, this one is not too hard to read once you learn to ignore all the citations. While I wish some issues in the book had been more fully explained, the volume provides ample references for those wishing additional information about most of these issues. Other issues will have to wait until a social history of the excavation and its excavators is published. |
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