Biographies and the Beaudry Legacy

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "“Historical Archaeology with Canon on the Side, Please”: In Honor of Mary C. Beaudry (1950-2020)" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Co-presenter Carolyn’s White’s 2009 edited volume The Materiality of Individuality is a capsule of Mary’s influence, in which we and several others of her circle appear. That volume and this session inspire us to reflect on how Mary entangled object and individual biography with such potent interpretive effect; how deeply this worldview influences our own scholarship; and how it shapes our individual work as archaeological educators and curators. We emerged from Mary’s tutelage with the conviction that everything can—and maybe should—be treated like a "small find": an individuated object with its own life history tied to the life histories of everyone who encountered it past, present, and future, including us. One of Mary’s legacies is that her approach to the entangled biographies of things and people functions as an ethical stance. She motivates us to find the significance of every little thing.  

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• “Historical Archaeology with Canon on the Side, Please”: In Honor of Mary C. Beaudry (1950-2020)   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2022

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology