Established in 1950, the Alfred Vincent Kidder Award for Eminence in the Field of American Archeology is presented every two years by the AAA to an outstanding archaeologist specializing in the archaeology of the Americas. The award has been given alternately to specialists in Mesoamerican archaeology and the archaeology of the Southwestern region – areas that were both central to the pioneering and exemplary work of AV Kidder. At the annual meeting recently in San Francisco, the AAA presented the 2012 Kidder Award to Wendy Ashmore, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Riverside. Below, our colleague Julia Hendon outlines Ashmore’s significant contributions that have earned her this prestigious honor.
Wendy Ashmore: 2012 Kidder Award Honoree
By Julia A Hendon (Gettysburg C)
Wendy Ashmore has been an active and influential member of our field through field research, publication, involvement in professional organizations, training and supervision of graduate students, and teaching at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. Her research has become a touchstone for the development of Mesoamerican archaeology. I would like to highlight three publications that she edited and to which she contributed important chapters.
The first is Lowland Maya Settlement Patterns, published in 1981 and resulting from an advanced research seminar at the School for American Research. This book, and particularly her introductory chapter, provided a clear and thoughtful synthesis of the burgeoning field of settlement pattern research that became a crucial reference for anyone wishing to consider the interplay between spatial patterning and settlement in Mesoamerica. Building on the ground breaking work of Gordon Willey, Ashmore provided Mesoamerican archaeologists with a “sense of the field” as well as valuable overviews of settlement patterns in the Maya area.
The second book is Household and Community in the Mesoamerican Past, published in 1988 and co-edited by Ashmore and Richard R. Wilk. This book demonstrated the value of the household as a way to understand Mesoamerican social dynamics and economic processes that could not be addressed through the study of ceremonial centers or monumental architecture. If Lowland Maya Settlement Patterns provided Mesoamerican archaeologists with a clearer sense of the value of spatial patterning, Household and Community went the next step by giving us a way to write a kind of social history of daily life from archaeological remains.
The third book is Archaeologies of Landscape: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Ashmore and A Bernard Knapp. Published in 1999, this book moved beyond Mesoamerican archaeology and helped establish the concept of landscape as part of the analytical repertoire of archaeologists. Here, and in subsequent publications on landscape, Ashmore laid out a conceptual framework for how archaeologists should think about landscape and how to relate landscape to settlement pattern. Ashmore has emerged as an eloquent exponent of the symbolic meaning of human interactions with the land in which they live. She has applied these ideas to specific landscapes, such as the Copan Valley, and in more general and theoretical ways that have been influential beyond the field of Mesoamerican archaeology.
While these three volumes reflect the evolution of Ashmore’s interests, they by no means cover all her research interests. Ashmore is as widely admired by her peers as a dirt archaeologist as she is for her theoretical and synthetic writings. She has carried out field research, often directing the projects as well, at Quirigua (Guatemala), Copan (Honduras), Xunantunich (Belize), and Gualjoquito in central Honduras. Her many publications on settlement patterns, the household, and landscape have reshaped our approach to the Maya in particular and to understanding the human and cultural landscapes produced in the past in significant ways that will continue to inspire new research directions and interpretations.
To learn more about the Archeology Division, visit our website . Send news, notices, and comments to: E Christian Wells, ecwells@usf.edu .
via Anthropology-News http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2012/12/01/wendy-ashmore-2012-kidder-award-honoree/
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