A Lineage of Listening

Abstract

Outside the mainstream of North American archaeology and academic anthropology, a few of Franz Boas’s students listened humbly to Indian people in their communities, instead of sitting in hotel rooms querying selected men from a schedule of topics. Frank Speck (1881-1950) was one of these; his student Claude E. Schaeffer mentored Tom Kehoe to listen to Blackfoot people as guides and teachers for archaeology in their homeland. I learned from Tom when I married him and we collaborated in archaeology.