The Kansas Anthropologist Reminlscence Project for Senior Plains Anthropologists

Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations,ask thy father and he will show thee, thy elders, and they will tell thee. Deuteronomy 32: 7. For the past six years, 'The KansasAnthropologist' has published an ongoing series of reminiscences orretrospective articles by senior Great Plains archaeologists. The aim of the project isto collect reminiscences from senior anthro­pologists regarding their experiences inpre-and post-World War II Plains archaeology, biological anthropology, and ethnology.The historian John Lukacs (1966:x) once offered an elegant and concise comment on thevalue of history, one that I offer here: "I believe that history, as a form of thought,is one of the most precious and perhaps unique rational posssessions of Westerncivilizations. The character of a person may appear best from the reconstruc­tion of thehistory of his life; the same is true of the character of nations. The very history of aprob­lem may reveal its essential diagnosis. There is no human endeavor that may not beapproached and studied profitably through its history." Fortunately, there hardly needsto be a justification anymore for such a project, as is attested by the recentprolifera­tion of research into the history of archaeology and anthropology on virtuallya global scale.The intention of these retrospective articles isnot to explore or diagnose any particular problem but rather to create a mosaic of firstperson narrratives informed by personal experience and illustrated with photos andanecdotes to illuminate the development of Plains anthropology in the 20thCentury