Ola Wolfhechel Jensen, ed.

Histories of Archaeological Practices: Reflections on Methods, Strategies,

and Social Organisation in Past Fieldwork.
David L. Browman. Cultural Negotiations: The Role of Women in the Founding of Americanist
Archaeology.
Histories of Archaeological Practices: Reflections on Methods, Strategies, and Social
Organisation in Past FieldworkCultural Negotiations: The Role of Women in the Founding of
Americanist Archaeology by Ola Wolfhechel Jensen; David L. Browman
Review by: Conor Burns
Isis, Vol. 106, No. 1 (March 2015), pp. 162-163
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162 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 106 : 1 (2015)
Ola Wolfhechel Jensen (Editor). Histories of
Archaeological Practices: Reflections on Meth-
ods, Strategies, and Social Organisation in Past
Fieldwork. (Studies, 20.) 336 pp., illus., index.
Stockholm: National Historical Museum, 2012.
(Cloth.)
David L. Browman. Cultural Negotiations:
The Role of Women in the Founding of Ameri-
canist Archaeology. (Critical Studies in the
History of Anthropology.) ix ⫹ 354 pp., bibl.,
index. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2013. $65 (cloth).
The books under review both aim to offer revi-
sionist perspectives on the history of archaeol-
ogy by focusing on practices or marginalized
contributors. Histories of Archaeological Prac-
tices grew out of a 2006 European Association
of Archaeologists conference session and col-
lects articles of varying length and quality with
the aim of shifting attention from ideas to prac-
tices in the history of archaeology. Ola Wolf-
hechel Jensen’s introductory historiographical
essay enthusiastically draws on various (now
dated) constructivist theoretical perspectives in
laying out a promising road map for a set of
essays (all written by archaeologists) meant to
address practices of “surveying, excavating and
documenting” (p. 27). That promise is rather
glaringly diminished, however, by a lack of ref-
erence to any recent work on the field sciences
by historians of science. Alas, many of the con-
tributions to the volume suffer from the same
myopia and struggle to escape an internalist,
whiggish orientation, despite best intentions.
That said, some valuable moments are worth
mentioning.
Dietrich Hakelberg examines the motivations
of early modern Silesian archaeological scholars
(generally theologians and physicians) who
were guided by Protestant humanist concerns
and used the biblical flood and the medieval
Christianization of the region as temporal sign-
posts. In this milieu, pagan cremation urns be-
came desirable collectibles, often displayed in
school libraries for moralizing lessons on death
and memory. According to Hakelberg, the
method of anatomical historia shaped ap-
proaches to excavation practices, such that ex-
cavation was presented as a kind of “autopsy
narrative” in a number of seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century works.
Åsa Jensen and Ola Wolfhechel Jensen exam-
ine the consolidation of networks and the de-
marcation of expertise in nineteenth-century
Sweden in the wake of the Ancient Monuments
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Act of 1867. In a setting rife with tensions be-
tween local scholars and state centralizers,
seemingly small details such as the use of graph
paper became important markers of “official”
archaeology in a process that resulted in a larger
epistemological shift of focus from artifacts to
settlement sites as objects of inquiry.
Gisela Eberhardt considers the evolution of bar-
row mound excavation techniques in nineteenth-
century German archaeology from trenching to a
more scientifically acceptable horizontally layered
excavation. Nonetheless, she argues, crude trenching
persisted because it was a more cost-effective form of
labor.
Julia Roberts examines how gender and class
concerns played out in British archaeology in
the first half of the twentieth century. Focusing
largely on Mortimer Wheeler’s excavations, Rob-
erts demonstrates how the creation of professional
identity hinged on carefully controlling the work-
force and enforcing rigid hierarchies of labor.
Workers were largely seen as mere earth-moving
machines that needed to be supervised carefully at
all times. This masculinization of fieldwork only
made it harder for women to become archaeolo-
gists, even if on the surface they were sometimes
encouraged to do so. The best route into archae-
ology for a woman was to marry an archaeologist,
as Tessa Wheeler did.
Elisabeth Arwill-Nordbladh interrogates post-
colonial conundrums involved in the work of
Hanna Rydh, who led the Swedish Archaeolog-
ical Expedition to Rajastan, India, in 1852–
1854. Despite Rydh’s apparent desire to contrib-
ute to an autonomous Indian archaeology, she
found the legacies of colonialism deeply en-
trenched: the British Archaeological Survey of
India, most especially under Wheeler, had indel-
ibly stamped Indian field practice, from training
and British-style militaristic field organization
to a “cradle of civilization” focus on the Indus
Valley as having the most desirable ancient
sites. After partition, Indian authorities be-
moaned the loss of the “best” sites to Pakistan.
Arwill-Nordbladh argues that Rydh skillfully
negotiated these colonial legacies and brought
contrasting archaeological and ethnographic
sensibilities to bear on her work, notably at
Rang Mahal.
Two final comments about this volume as a
whole: first, on a positive note, it is richly illus-
trated with high-quality reproductions; second,
and more negatively, it could have stood a much
more rigorous round of English-language edit-
ing to improve the readability of many entries.
David Browman’s Cultural Negotiations
aims to give readers a mostly prosopographical
account of women involved in “Americanist”
 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 106 : 1 (2015)
archaeology (i.e., archaeology performed in
or about the Americas) from the mid-nineteenth
century to 1940. The author’s main goal is to
convey a sense of the sheer number of women
who were substantially involved (he ultimately
touches on the roles of over two hundred
women), many of whom occupied pioneering
positions and yet have remained invisible to the
historical record. Browman does an exemplary
job of tracking surname changes in rescuing
many interesting careers from obscurity— ca-
reers that included field and museum work but,
importantly, also organizational activities asso-
ciated with world fairs, fundraising, and lobby-
ing. Browman’s portraits illuminate the nearly
impossible odds women faced in entering and
maintaining archaeological careers, especially if
they also wanted to have a family. Women en-
countered rampant sexism that extended from a
general patriarchal attitude toward museum
work as a kind of feminine housekeeping to
specific outrages such as Columbia University’s
very expensive publication requirement for the
granting of the Ph.D. Only men received finan-
cial assistance for this; women were generally
unable to pay the thousands of dollars needed to
print as many as 120 bound copies of their
dissertations and so, despite successful defenses,
were not granted degrees until critical career
moments had long passed. This book is also full
of tantalizing windows onto topics other than
specific biographies that demand further exam-
ination, such as the role of the Women’s An-
thropological Society of America in Washington
(founded in 1885) and the development of new
areas of research (textile and ceramic analysis,
paleoethnobotany) by women as a means of
professional self-preservation. Cultural Negoti-
ations is an invaluable reference work, and I
would highly recommend it as a starting point
for graduate students and others looking for fu-
ture projects.
CONOR BURNS
Curzio Cipriani; Luciana Fantoni; Luisa Poggi;
Alba Scarpellini. Le collezioni mineralogiche del
Museo di Storia Naturale dell’Universita di Firenze
dalle origini a oggi. (Studi: Accademia Toscana di
Scienze e Lettere “La Colombaria,” 247.) xv ⫹ 236
pp., illus., apps., bibl., index. Florence: Leo S.
Olschki, 2011. €28 (paper).
How does a mineral collection start and how
does its growth lead to the founding of a mu-
seum? The authors address these questions by
describing the activities that led to the progres-
sive buildup of the collection in the Mineralogy
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163
Rooms of the Natural History Museum at the
University of Florence.
The Florentine collections have great histori-
cal and scientific value; they comprise almost
50,000 specimens collected from around the
world since the fifteenth century and represent
more than 2,800 of the 4,000 species of known
minerals. The endeavor of collecting the Flor-
entine minerals over the course of five centuries
bears little resemblance to the common notion
of museum collecting as static and sleepy, the
result of an easy conservation process. The ex-
istence of the mineral collection originally
owned by the Grand Dukes of Tuscany owes
much to the dedication of a small number of
professionals who proposed the collections to an
international scientific and commercial network
and established a thoughtful exchange policy
with several academies and private collectors.
However, Le collezioni mineralogiche del
Museo di Storia Naturale dell’Universita di
Firenze dalle origini a oggi also describes nu-
merous periods of uncertainty and regression,
during which lack of institutional interest and
inevitable personal antagonisms weakened the
scientific significance of the museum.
The book is divided in four parts, each of
which describes a “season” (the authors use this
expression often) in the growth of the mineral-
ogical museum. The first chapter describes how,
between 1771 and 1790, some small collections
of minerals scattered in the Uffizi were brought
together in the Royal Cabinet of Physics and
Natural History of Florence. Giovanni Targioni
Tozzetti was the proponent of the idea of a
general collection and editor of the first draft of
the catalogue in 1791. In the second chapter,
through a long process of analysis and compar-
ison of two catalogues, edited in 1791 and 1820,
the authors describe how the collections were
gradually put together and structured into an
autonomous Corpus Mineralibus. The synoptic
tables in Appendixes II, III, and IV are based on
a set of data taken from the two catalogues.
They are very useful for an understanding of the
development of the collections. The narrative
technique of this chapter is effective in convey-
ing the sense and the rationality of the exhibition
space. The reader is guided through the sixteen
rooms of the museum as they appeared two
hundred years ago and is offered a detailed de-
scription of the quality, quantity, and arrange-
ment of the exhibit.
The story of the third season, the longest and
most significant, is told through the process of
drafting of the 1844 and 1943 catalogues. The
mineralogical collection grew enormously in
size and quality from the fall of the Grand