Search results for ""author william y adams""

William Y. Adams grew up in an Indian Service family in an Indian Service town in the 1930s. Window Rock, Arizona was the newly founded administrative capital for the vast Navajo reservation, and all 298 of its residents were Indian Bureau employees or their families. With the exception of a few low-level service personnel, none were Navajo, nor did they have any detailed familiarity with the world of hogans and corrals. They were technocrats, skilled in agriculture, range management, forestry, mining, education, public health, and law enforcement, among other things. Despite their varied backgrounds and skills, however, they shared a common determination to “do right by the Indians” after decades of government neglect and mismanagement. That concept, however, originated not in Window Rock but in Washington, the administrative headquarters of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.In the years following World War II, Adams lived and worked among Navajos and Hopis in a number of different capacities. As an archaeological explorer, an ethnologist, an interviewer for the Arizona Bureau of Ethnic Research, a livestock drive foreman, and - perhaps most importantly - a trader, he became aware of the myth of the Indian: a belief in “the Indian” as a kind of unitary, symbolic figure, who stood as the surrogate for hundreds of tribes, cultures, and languages spread across the American continent.In Indian Policies in the Americas, Adams addresses the idea that “the Indian,” as conceived by colonial powers and later by different postcolonial interest groups, was as much ideology as empirical reality. Adams surveys the policies of the various colonial and postcolonial powers, then reflects upon the great ideological, moral, and intellectual issues that underlay those policies.

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Down to Earth Archaeology collects sixteen archaeological papers by Professor William Y. Adams chosen by the author, who added introductory commentary to each. These articles were written at various times during his lengthy and productive academic career for different purposes and for different audiences. Most of those selected had been previously published only in a limited way, either as conference proceedings or contributions to various Festschriften, and as such he wanted to enable them to reach a wider readership than they had originally. He described this collection as his ‘dernières pensées’. The essays encompass a wide range of topics, from reflections upon the successes, failures and lessons learned from the UNESCO International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia in the 1960s, in which Bill was very much a leading figure and which he was uniquely positioned to critique, to discussions and criticisms of the theoretical framework of ‘New’ or ‘Processual Archaeology’ and its application of ‘scientific’ methods. Other papers included here are seminal works discussing the ideological concepts of typology and classification and their practical application to archaeological excavations, notably his own major excavations conducted at the large Nubian cityscapes of Meinarti, Kulubnarti and Qasr Ibrim, and the ceramic kilns at Faras.

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This volume records the results of excavations and investigations undertaken by the EES between 1963 and 1998 on the largest surviving building, the Cathedral Church, at the site of Qasr Ibrim, one of the very few not totally destroyed by inundation following the construction of the Aswan Dam and the creation of Lake Nasser. It sets out the archaeological evidence, which has resulted from excavations and a detailed study of the surviving fabric, and provides an interpretation of that evidence for the construction of the Cathedral Church, including its subsequent abandonment and use as a domestic dwelling and then an Ottoman Mosque. It also places the building and the site within the context of medieval Nubia.

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