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Fearless Archaeologist: Susan Kent’s Vision for Ethnoarchaeology

Susan Kent was a remarkable archaeologist who died in 2003 at the age of 50. That she died in her hotel room in Milwaukee while attending the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) meetings rather adds to her mystique leading Kehoe (2006) to refer to her as an ‘anomalous archaeologist.’ In the decade since her death, the American Anthropological Association published a special volume on Sue Kent and her work in their Archaeological Papers series (Ashmore et al. 2006), containing numerous tributes to her and retrospectives on her life and work. It is hard to imagine that anything else needs to be said, but Susan Kent was truly a classic whose work dominates ethnoarchaeology, and she is most deserving of being placed permanently in the pantheon of ethnoarchaeological forebears in the Ethnoarchaeology Classics series. I had the pleasure of knowing Sue, although I did not know her well. Obviously, I knew her work and had heard her give papers at conferences, but I first started speaking with her when she invited me to present a paper in her session on gender at the Society of Africanist Archaeologists meetings in 1996. I was unable to attend the conference but I did contribute a chapter to what would become her edited volume Gender in African Prehistory (Kent 1998a). Sue ran the editorship of the book like a military campaign, demanding that all contributors meet strict deadlines and threatening them with expulsion if they did not comply. At this point Sue had a lot of excellent edited volumes under her belt. She seems to always have had the power to draw big names to her volumes, a power that encouraged everyone to comply with her orders, especially junior scholars like me who were anxious to be associated with the luminaries. In those days, email was just beginning and much of Sue’s cajoling and threatening had to be done by regular mail and by phone. Sue had very little financial support at Old Dominion University, and she had to pay for all her long distance phone calls and all her mail out of her own pocket, making her dedication to producing edited volumes all the more impressive. When I discovered this, I called her back whenever she phoned me so that we could talk at length on my institution’s dime. Sue was full of ideas, a lively conversationalist and very funny. She was a terrifically generous colleague, very interested in networking people, and I have her to thank for several introductions and opportunities that have come my way. The shadow over her life however, was her state of chronic ill health. In the mid 1990s