The Volunteer’s Contribution to Archaeology and Vice Versa

Except in Woody Allen movies, there are no “man-in-the-street” brain surgeons. No journal that I know of invites its readers to spend two weeks as volunteer atomic physicists. It’s different with archaeology. From the very beginning, the amateur was a key figure. Heinrich Schleimann, who revealed the treasures of ancient Troy in the 1870’s by using Homer as a guidebook, was an import-export merchant, not an academician. John Lloyd Stephens, who, a few decades earlier, hacked his way through the thick Yucatan underbrush to rediscover 047ancient Mayan sites, was trained as a lawyer. His post as charge d’affaires in […]