A Place Remembered (Essay‪)‬

Historian Curtis Hinsley and archaeologist David Wilcox have greatly enriched Southwestern studies through their admirable reporting on the Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition of the 1880s in this journal and in Southwest Center books (Hinsley and Wilcox 1995, 1996, 2002). They remind us of "the continuing dialogue over the last century between Boston and the Southwest, and the important legacy we have all inherited" (Wilcox 1995: 525). Now comes archaeologist Hester Davis with her stunning new book, Remembering Awatovi, to provide us with a fascinating example of an enduring New England-Southwest connection that took place a half century after the Hemenway Expedition (Davis 2008). She gives us a sparkling account of the now-legendary Awatovi Expedition of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology of Harvard University from 1935 to 1939. She calls it "the last and largest of the Peabody's pre-World War II expeditions" (p. xix), but it can also be viewed as the first of the big projects of modern Southwestern archaeology. The agenda for the modern period was created by 1930 out of the tensions of the period between the Hemenway and Awatovi expeditions (Snead 2001). Her story is a powerful evocation of the importance of place and the nature of the connections between places. Although Hinsley and Wilcox are mainly concerned with the intellectual impact of the Hemenway Expedition, Davis reminds us in many delightful ways that these expeditions have important social as well as intellectual consequences.