Announcing the first winner of the Joan Gero Book Award
Kathryn Weedman Arthur
for
THE LIVES OF STONE TOOLS:
CRAFTING THE STATUS, SKILL AND IDENTITY OF FLINTKNAPPERS
Weedman’s respect for Indigenous knowledge, analysis of the interplay between technology and cultural meaning, and its original focus on a traditional archaeological subject were deemed by the committee to embody the Values of the World Archaeological Congress.
The Lives of Stone Tools: Crafting the Status, Skill, and Identity of Flintknappers by Kathryn Weedman (2018) University of Arizona Press (https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt20p57bp) gives voice to the Indigenous Gamo lithic practitioners of southern Ethiopia. For the Gamo, their stone tools are alive, and their work in flintknapping is interwoven with status, skill, and the life histories of their stone tools.
Anthropologist Kathryn Weedman Arthur offers insights from her more than twenty years working with the Gamo. She deftly addresses historical and present-day experiences and practices, privileging the Gamo’s perspectives. Providing a rich, detailed look into the world of lithic technology, Arthur urges us to follow her into a world that recognizes Indigenous theories of material culture as valid alternatives to academic theories. In so doing, she subverts long-held Western perspectives concerning gender, skill, and lifeless status of inorganic matter.
The book offers the perspectives that, contrary to long-held Western views, stone tools are living beings with a life course, and lithic technology is a reproductive process that should ideally include both male and female participation. Only individuals of particular lineages knowledgeable in the lives of stones may work with stone technology. Knappers acquire skill and status through incremental guided instruction corresponding to their own phases of maturation. The tools’ lives parallel those of their knappers from birth (procurement), circumcision (knapping), maturation (use), seclusion (storage), and death (discardment).
Given current expectations that the Gamo’s lithic technology may disappear with the next generation, The Lives of Stone Tools is a work of vital importance and possibly one of the last contemporaneous books about a population that engages with the craft daily.
“Arthur advocates that researchers stop imposing Western ontological perspectives onto non-Western technological systems, and suggests that we can do better science by being open to alternative ontologies rather than producing tautologies that reify those of the West.”—African Archaeological Review
“A highly significant contribution to archaeology and ethnoarchaeology, and likely the most detailed study of contemporary peoples who make and use stone tools.”—Thomas R. Hester, Professor Emeritus, University of Texas at Austin
“The most important contribution to ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological research on stone tools in years. Arthur’s attention to detail and focus on the culturally situated production and use of chipped stone makes this book invaluable to any archaeologist interested in craft production.”—Zachary X. Hruby, Northern Kentucky University
Dr. Weedman Arthur is Professor of Anthropology at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg (https://www.usf.edu/arts-sciences/departments/anthropology/people/karthur.aspx) and serves the congress as the co-editor of Archaeologies, the Journal of the World Archaeological Congress.
OUTSTANDING NOMINEES
Ten books were considered for the Gero award; all embody WAC values and make important contributions. WAC is proud to share these intellectual triumphs with our membership.
Alice Kehoe’s book Girl Archaeologist: Sisterhood in a Sexist Profession (2022, University of Nebraska Press, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv25p443c ) has been selected as a 2022 Choice Outstanding Academic Title. This prestigious list reflects the best in scholarly titles, both print and digital, reviewed by Choice during the previous year and brings with it the extraordinary recognition of the academic library community.
Her memoir, Girl Archaeologist: Sisterhood in a Sexist Profession, is a story not only of a woman’s persistence in a scientific field but of speaking truth to power. Her memoir is available from Amazon in print and Kindle editions. Order directly online from the publisher at a discounted price of $14.97 USD at nebraskapress.unl.edu (use DISCOUNT CODE 6AS21) (United States or Canada). Also available from distributor Longleaf Services at 1-800-848-6224. To order outside of North America, call Combined Academic Publishers in the United Kingdom at +44 (0)1423 526350 and use the discount code CS40UNP.
Maritime Heritage in Crisis: Indigenous Landscapes and Global Ecological Breakdown by Richard M. Hutchings (2022, Routledge, ISBN 9781629583488) Grounded in critical heritage studies and drawing on a Pacific Northwest Coast case study, Maritime Heritage in Crisis explores the causes and consequences of the contemporary destruction of Indigenous heritage sites in maritime settings. Maritime heritage landscapes are undergoing a period of unprecedented crisis: these areas are severely impacted by coastal development, continued population growth and climate change. Indigenous heritage sites are thought to be particularly vulnerable to these changes and cultural resource management is frequently positioned as a community’s first line of defense, yet there is increasing evidence that this archaeological technique is an ineffective means of protection.
Exploring themes of colonial dislocation and displacement, Hutchings positions North American archaeology as neoliberal statecraft: a tool of government designed to promote and permit the systematic clearance of Indigenous heritage landscapes in advance of economic development. Presenting the institution of archaeology and cultural resource management as a grave threat to Indigenous maritime heritage, Maritime Heritage in Crisis offers an important lesson on the relationship between neoliberal heritage regimes and global ecological breakdown.
Murujuga Rock Art Heritage and Landscape Iconoclasm by José Antonio González Zarandona (2020, University of Pennsylvania Press, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv16t6f39). Located in the Dampier Archipelago of Western Australia, Murujuga is the single largest archaeological site in the world. It contains an estimated one million petroglyphs, or rock art motifs, produced by the Indigenous Australians who have historically inhabited the archipelago. To date, there has been no comprehensive survey of the site’s petroglyphs or those who created them. Since the 1960s, regional mining interests have caused significant damage to this site, destroying an estimated 5 to 25 percent of the petroglyphs in Murujuga. Today, Murujuga holds the unenviable status of being one of the most endangered archaeological sites in the world.
José Antonio González Zarandona provides a full postcolonial analysis of Murujuga as well as a geographic and archaeological overview of the site, its ethnohistory, and its considerable significance to Indigenous groups, before examining the colonial mistreatment of Murujuga from the seventeenth century to the present. Drawing on a range of postcolonial perspectives, Zarandona reads the assaults on the rock art of Murujuga as instances of what he terms “landscape iconoclasm”: the destruction of art and landscapes central to group identity in pursuit of ideological, political, and economic dominance. Viewed through the lens of landscape iconoclasm, the destruction of Murujuga can be understood as not only the result of economic pressures but also as a means of reinforcing—through neglect, abandonment, fragmentation, and even certain practices of heritage preservation—the colonial legacy in Western Australia. Murujuga provides a case study through which to examine, and begin to reject, archaeology’s global entanglement with colonial intervention and the politics of heritage preservation.
The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere by Paulette F. C. Steeves (2021, University of Nebraska Press, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1s5nzn7) is a reclaimed history of the deep past of Indigenous people in North and South America during the Paleolithic. Paulette F. C. Steeves mines evidence from archaeology sites and Paleolithic environments, landscapes, and mammalian and human migrations to make the case that people have been in the Western Hemisphere not only just prior to Clovis sites (10,200 years ago) but for more than 60,000 years, and likely more than 100,000 years.
Steeves discusses the political history of American anthropology to focus on why pre-Clovis sites have been dismissed by the field for nearly a century. She explores supporting evidence from genetics and linguistic anthropology regarding First Peoples and time frames of early migrations. Additionally, she highlights the work and struggles faced by a small yet vibrant group of American and European archaeologists who have excavated and reported on numerous pre-Clovis archaeology sites.
In this first book on Paleolithic archaeology of the Americas written from an Indigenous perspective, The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere includes Indigenous oral traditions, archaeological evidence, and a critical and decolonizing discussion of the development of archaeology in the Americas.
Going Underground: The Meanings of Death and Burial for Minority Groups in Israel by Talia Shay (2021, Archaeopress, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1jk0jh5) is about the attitudes towards death and burial in contemporary society. It provides information on the attitudes of several minority groups living in Israel today, including four communities of Russian Jews, an ultra-religious Jewish community and a Palestinian-Christian community. ‘Going Underground’ has a double meaning: it refers to the actions taken by archaeologists to inquire about the past and present and involves digging and recording. Second, it considers the challenges and protests launched by the groups of immigrants and minorities mentioned in the book, against state-control over death.
Cultural Heritage Management and Indigenous People in the North of Colombia: Back to the Ancestors’ Landscape by Wilhelm Londoño Díaz (2020, Routledge, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367822774) explores indigenous people’s struggle for territorial autonomy in an aggressive political environment and the tensions between heritage tourism and Indigenous rights.South American cases where local communities, especially Indigenous groups, are opposed to infrastructure projects, are little known. This book lays out the results of more than a decade of research in which the resettlement of a pre-Columbian village has been documented. It highlights the difficulty of establishing the link between archaeological sites and objects, and Indigenous people due to legal restrictions. From a decolonial framework, the archaeology of Pueblito Chairama (Teykú) is explored, and the village stands as a model to understand the broader picture of the relationship between Indigenous people and political and economic forces in South America.
The Materiality of Remembering: An ethnographic study of the living spaces in a Nahua municipality in Veracruz, Mexico by Julieta Flores-Muñoz (2020, British Archaeological Reports, ISBN-13 9781407357034) Although oral narrations are the way in which history has survived in Mexican indigenous contexts, they have been long disregarded as a valid source of information for archaeological research. The Materiality of Remembering argues that orality as a tool for research does not only provide clues for exploring indigenous uses of space, but that these narrations become central when investigating the way materiality changes through the act of remembrance. It is then through oral histories that materiality becomes fluid-moves and changes-through the constant process of remembrance. Then, by exploring orality in Mixtla de Altamirano in the Zongolica Mountain Range, Flores-Muñoz provides a corpus of data that helps us explore the interwoven relationship established between people (in this case the Nahuas in Mixtla de Altamirano) and their material world in the process of accounting history.
Native Providence: Memory, Community, and Survivance in the Northeast by Patricia E. Rubertone (2020. University of Nebraska Press, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv17ppct6). A city of modest size, Providence, Rhode Island, had the third-largest Native American population in the United States by the first decade of the twentieth century. Native Providence tells the stories of the city’s Native residents at this historical moment and in the decades before and after, a time when European Americans claimed that Northeast Natives had mostly vanished.
Denied their rightful place in modernity, men, women, and children from Narragansett, Nipmuc, Pequot, Wampanoag, and other ancestral communities traveled diverse and complicated routes to make their homes in this city. They found each other, carved out livelihoods, and created neighborhoods that became their urban homelands―new places of meaningful attachments. Accounts of individual lives and family histories emerge from historical and anthropological research in archives, government offices, historical societies, libraries, and museums and from community memories, geography, and landscape.
Patricia E. Rubertone chronicles the survivance of the Native people who stayed, left, and returned, or lived in Providence briefly, who faced involuntary displacement by urban renewal, and who made their presence known in this city and in the wider Indigenous and settler-colonial worlds. Their everyday experiences reenvision Providence’s past and illuminate documentary and spatial tactics of inequality that erased Native people from most nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history.
Homeless Heritage: Collaborative Social Archaeology as Therapeutic Practice by Rachael Kiddey (2017, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0192536532, 978019253653) describes the process of using archaeological methodologies to collaboratively document how contemporary homeless people use and experience the city. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken in Bristol and York, the book first describes the way in which archaeological methods and theory have come to be usefully applied to the contemporary world, before exploring the historical development of the concept of homelessness. Working with homeless people, the author undertook surveys and two excavations of contemporary homeless sites, and the team co-curated two public heritage exhibitions – with surprising results. Complementing a growing body of literature that details how collaborative and participatory heritage projects can give voice to marginalised groups, Homeless Heritage details what it means to be homeless in the twenty first century.
AWARD SUBMISSION INFORMATION
Over the past 30 years the World Archaeological Congress has grown and changed. Many of our values and commitments have seen some success in the world; gender equality, human rights, community collaboration, and ethical research design are all now fairly routine topics for the SAA, the EAA, the SAB and most all of our regionally based sister organizations. Many archaeologists who once looked over their shoulder at the unwanted challenge of WAC values, have turned around and extended a hand.
But our job is not over. The controversies and injustices that gave us the congress are still with us and still fomenting evil in the world – sexism, racism, poverty, inequality and war all have deep roots nourished by ideas about heritage. Now is not the time to lose our critical edge or back away from our political clout.
As happens every four years, we celebrate the influx of new members into WAC through the staging of the congress; they are the vitality and the future of our organization and our mission. But the future of WAC depends on making each new wave of members aware of our unique and uniquely political heritage. WAC has a very particular code of ethics that gives us coherence and gives our accords and awards and acclimations teeth – people have begun to listen when the World Archaeological Congress says what needs to be said.
But it is difficult to know how to convey our ethics and values to the next generation. Our commitment to democratic organization, bottom-up management, and cultural diversity makes it difficult to establish institutional memory, much less make sure that our membership shares it. While we must include members who believe archaeology can be apolitical, they should be aware that most of our membership have joined because they find that stance untenable and even offensive. But people simply do not read codes of ethics and are apt to be so excited about being heard they forget what the impact of their voice can be.
Joan Gero bequeathed WAC a way to solve this problem with the example of her book Yutopian: Archaeology, Ambiguity and the Production of Knowledge in Northwest Argentina. This book embodies WAC values of the democratization of knowledge, engagement with the gendered and political present, respect and collaboration with Indigenous communities, concern for human rights, peer collaboration with local scholars, and educational opportunities for students, done in the context of meticulously recorded data collection and replicable science. It will be a very hard act to follow. Nevertheless this book sets a sort of standard of excellence to which we all might aspire; as a realization of WAC values it can serve the purpose of bequeathing WAC heritage to the next generation of members.
To allow it to serve this purpose and to ensure this pivotal work receives the status it deserves, Yutopian: Archaeology, Ambiguity and the Production of Knowledge in Northwest Argentina was given a presidential award and WAC has instituted the Joan Gero book award to go the next book which best embodies WAC values. The award be granted every 4 years, or perhaps less, since we do not anticipate that a suitable successor will appear very often. The award has been endowed with travel money so the recipient will be able to receive the award in person, beginning at the congress of 2025 – WAC-10.
Eligibility
1. Book must be directly relevant to archaeology
2. Books may be nominated by the author, but both the author and the nominator must be WAC members.
3. Book must have been published within 4 years of nomination; unpublished manuscripts or shorter pieces are not eligible
4. Books may be published in any language, but must be submitted as an on-line only publication
Submission requirements
1. Electronic copy of the book
2. Letter of nomination that explains how the book embodies WAC values (as described above). Letters of nomination should not exceed 3 pages.
3. Book and nomination must be submitted by the first day of April 2025 and will be announced at WAC 10; the Prize will be presented at WAC-11.
Review process
The book will be reviewed by the Joan Gero Book Award Committee. Please send nominations and electronic versions of published manuscripts to: GeroBookAward@gmail.com by 1 April 2025.
We urge all archaeologists to have the temerity to reach for this award and look forward to reading what Utopias Joan’s work will inspire.
Citation: Joan M. Gero 2015 Yutopian: Archaeology, Ambiguity, and the Production of Knowledge in Northwest ArgentinaSeries: William and Bettye Nowlin Endowment, Art, History, and Culture of the Western Hemisphere, Austin: University of Texas Press