Abstract
Bill Adams’ very personal memoir of his life as an anthropologist and archaeologist is a truly compelling example of this increasingly rare genre. His professional wanderings from the deserts of Arizona to the northern Sudan and then on to the edge of Tien an Men Square make great fireside reading. However, there is much more to this book than the charming travelogue of an adventurous archaeologist.
The succession of fascinating fieldwork destinations shapes a disarming picaresque, but at the same time, there is an intellectual journey explored, and Adams gains in confidence on this aspect of the book as he develops his story. His thoughtful account of a life split between the university world and that of public archaeology or applied anthropology, his careful discussion of methodological choices and his grappling with theory construction are welcome. His reflections on what he sees in some respects as the contingent and almost accidental nature of his career undoubtedly contributed to decisions in retrospective narrative construction as he wrote.
‘Anthropologist as hero yet again’? More ambiguous and self-critical than that, this book offers a very down-to-earth analysis on the transience of scholarly fashions too. And this is gracefully woven into his larger narrative. Adams is frank in sharing his surprise about what lasted the course in his own work and what did not. He also gratefully depicts the development of an invaluable full professional partnership with his wife, textile specialist Nettie Adams.
Bill Adam’s discussion of his own research methods in particular is worth exploring. His general approach over time seems to have been eclectic, pragmatic and grounded in attention to the development of typologies and the construction of a statistically informed and archivally appropriate set of timelines, geographic distribution studies and so on. This makes sense given the time frame of his most active career and the clients and institutions for which he worked. What Adams built seems to have remained valuable, but the long time frames and detailed study demanded by methodological approaches may seem improbably luxurious and extremely enviable to some younger scholars raised in a different era.
Not a man for economical sampling procedures, Adams showed tenacious commitment to very detailed examination of large data sets in the quantitative side of his work, and his account of what these achieved is instructive. There is no index to this book, a shame, because it covers a lot of territory both geographically and intellectually, and this is a book to keep and re-read, the pleasures and utility of which would be more accessible with an index.