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Reviews
| The Man Who Found Thoreau: Roland W. Robbins and the Rise of Historical Archaeology in America. By Donald W. Linebaugh. Durham: Univ. of New Hampshire Press, 2005. xii+294 pp., illus., plans, sections, appen., notes, bibl., index. $24.95 hb (ISBN 1-58465-425-2).
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There is an increasing interest in the uses of biography to tell the stories of disciplinary history in American anthropology and archaeology at the finest scale, that of individual lives and events. Recent examples include collective biographies (Getzel Cohen and Martha Joukowsky, Breaking Ground: Pioneering Women Archaeologists, 2004), prosopography or group network biography (Catherine Lavender, Scientists and Storytellers: Feminist Anthropologists and the Construction of the American Southwest, 2006), and individual biographies (Terry Barnhart, Ephraim George Squier and the Development of American Anthropology, 2005, and Martha Kerns, Scenes from the High Desert: Julian Steward's Life and Theory, 2003). Biography is a worthy way of investigating disciplinary histories. Apart from charting their commonalities, the biographical approach can expose assumptions, biases, and accidents that are sometimes mistakenly understood as disciplinarian.
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Donald Linebaugh's biography of Roland W. Robbins, one of the developers of historical archaeology, now joins this group. Robbins is important to the discipline because of his work at a long list of northeastern sites, his early work at places associated with famous persons, his reputation for extremes, and the fact that his career highs and lows coincide with the quest for disciplinary standards in U.S. archaeological practice. This biography focuses especially upon the critical stages of disciplinary growth of historical archaeology and examines in analytical detail the processes of disciplinary values transformations and institutional credentialing that appear to be part of the maturation agonies of all modern American academic and professional pursuits.
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Robbins was a self-educated historian and archaeologist, an inventor of historical archaeological field methods. He is of particular interest to IA readers because his targets included well-known early sites of American industrial iron works, such as Saugus and Falling Creek. His original work at these esteemed places also attracted much negative attention from his peers, related to what were perceived as his highly unorthodox archaeological practices. The book addresses more, however, than Robbins's methodological contributions or disasters. It attempts to place his life and work in a generalizing cultural context that analyzes Robbins as a type: a genuine American example of the self-made and self-defined man. This imagery of the honest, plain talking Yankee, self-effacing and practical, was carefully chartered and deliberately maintained by Robbins, offering him a pose to strike in contrast to that of his parodied adversary: the stuffy, overeducated, effete, insufferable credentialed archaeologist with pressed tweeds and a permanent office pallor. Robbins also provides a bit of a northeastern regional contrast to that other cultivated iconic character of archaeology, the western-influenced, dust-covered, beer-drinking, irreverent "cowboy of science."
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Assisted by family members of Robbins, Linebaugh had unfettered access to the memories and papers that documented Robbins's career. This combination of access and carte blanche is essential for scholarly biography; its opposite is hagiography, which this book is not. In addition, Linebaugh was able to conduct candid interviews with many firsthand acquaintances of Robbins. One curiosity to this reader is the fact that one of Robbins's prominent contemporaries and peers, Ivor Noël Hume of Colonial Williamsburg fame, did not appear to be a source for the book. This is somewhat surprising, given the parallels in the archaeological careers of the two founders, particularly regarding the credentialing process, which held much harsher consequences for Robbins than for Noël Hume.
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Linebaugh narrates the career of Robbins, by day a self-employed handyman, foregrounding the project from which the title derives—locating the original position of Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond, Massachusetts. The larger story of Robbins's career, told chapter by chapter via the sites that he researched, makes a great tale because it reveals the larger challenges to the development of historical archaeology during the 1930s–1970s: the struggle for appropriate methods, the role of mechanized excavation, the need for sophistication with respect to the stratigraphic method applied to historic sites/industrial sites, what to make of artifacts. The book also considers other familiar modern problems: the curation problems faced when multiple institutions work in sequence at the same enormous sites, the sagas of lost records and lost collections, changes in personnel, shifts in institutional interests. This is a good story because everything happens within it, including the complexities of personal/professional friendships on the rocks, intellectual property disputes, and the challenges of working with goal-driven community sponsors.
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In any historical narrative, the reader can sometimes feel the author struggling for control in the contest between a topical versus a chronological structure—a recurrent and challenging issue with storytelling. In Linebaugh's work, this struggle is visible in several instances where conclusions jump ahead of story line, and identical quotes are repeated within individual chapters. These are minor complaints, however, perhaps not so much a result of concept as of the need for screening with a finer sieve.
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Robbins's relative lack of name recognition today is in part due to his lack of academic credentials (ironically, it was not the "academy" but the federal government whose regulations disqualified Robbins from high-profile archaeological work), yet his legacy includes forays into areas that are now thought of as essential parts of historical archaeology: creative restoration/interpretation, investigation of industrial factories, and public involvement (including children) in archaeological data recovery.
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It is important to understand that Robbins was ahead of his time in significant ways for the interests of industrial archaeology: that the use of machinery is sometimes necessary and justified; that industrial sites are distinctly complex in systematic ways, are not the same as domestic or defensive sites, and require their own expertise in field methods and in terms of contextual understandings; and that, finally, descendant community involvement in the compelling stories of community history are essential parts of the research endeavor.
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