Fragment: Autobiography vs. Memoir

Fragment from Frye, Richard N. Greater Iran: A 20th-Century Odyssey. Costa Mesa: Mazda, 2005.

An autobiography is the story of one's life, while memoirs, we are told, are more ambiguous than events in life, including what one heard or witnessed, sometimes of historical interest, but more often of personal situations in which he or she has participated. A story or anecdote, either true or fictitious, may have been heard or even read by the author, and included in either memoirs or autobiography, or even expanded into a work of literature. In the pages which follow I plead guilty to a mixture of autobiography and memoir, but a lifetime of writing historical prose, much of it accessible to the lay public, has given me a sense of the sweep of 3000 years of the history of 'Greater Iran', and this enters these pages, as well as some of the actors in the cultural and political history of the Middle East and Central Asia.

page xi.

Fragment: Elevator Speech

Fragment from Tarler, David. “An Afterlife of Sorts.” Journal of Eastern Mediterranian Archaeology and Heitage Studies 3, no. 3 (2015): 270–76. doi:10.5325/jeasmedarcherstu.3.3.0270. http://www.jstor.org.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/stable/10.5325/jeasmedarcherstu.3.3.0270

“I used to be young and foolish, and poor but happy, but after a while, I was just foolish and poor.” That is the terse, “elevator” response I've been giving for more than 20 years to the question, “Why did you leave archaeology in Israel for law school in the United States?”

The decision to change careers (and countries) was not an easy one, and it took a long time. I had lived in Israel for almost 17 years, beginning when I was 19 and a transfer student from The University of Chicago to the Departments of Archaeology and Jewish History at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

page 270.

Fragment: Third Person Autobiography

Fragment from Albright, William Foxwell. “William Foxwell Albright.” In American Spiritual Autobiographies, Fifteen Self-Portraits. Edited by Lois Finkelstein, 156–81. New York: Harper, 1948.

In the following concise "spiritual autobiography", the subject will attempt to appraise his own development, in the light of the more pertinent facts of his education, following this sketch by a series of brief treatments of five interrelated themes where his present views have been most clearly influenced by the external facts of his education and experience. Couching the recital in the third person and omitting subjective  judgements on his own development on his own development as far as possible, he will bear in mind that the reader will scarcely be interested in any biographical detail except in so far as it throws convincing light on the main theme.

page 157.

Fragment: Alt-Ac Precariousness

Fragment from Kansa, Sarah Whitcher, and Eric Kansa. “Reflections on a Road Less Traveled: Alt-Ac Archaeology.” Journal of Eastern Mediterranian Archaeology and Heitage Studies 3, no. 3 (2015): 293–98. doi:10.5325/jeasmedarcherstu.3.3.0293. [http://www.jstor.org.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/stable/10.5325/jeasmedarcherstu.3.3.0293]

While independent nonprofit status offers us more opportunity for longer-term intellectual and academic freedom than perhaps experienced by many university-based alt-acs, the continual need to secure more funding to maintain our salaries does take its toll. Granting is highly competitive. Regardless of a proposal's other merits, one poor review by someone with a different theoretical or political agenda can sink a grant application. For tenured faculty, such issues are time-consuming annoyances. For alt-acs—including us—these issues can mean the end of one's salary. Moreover, unlike tenure-track faculty, this precarious status represents a permanent state. Alt-acs have no means of getting tenure and no means of ever acquiring the academic freedom that comes with a guaranteed paycheck.

That precariousness and contingency highlights the intellectual costs of neoliberalism. We would be more outspoken about certain issues and directions in “digital archaeology” if we had some of the protections of tenure. Indeed, our activism and advocacy on certain issues, especially on open access and concerns about over-centralization in digital systems has done us some damage in funding competitions, at least judging from criticisms in failed proposals. Obviously, criticism and debate are necessary; however, they are activities that are more survivable by tenured faculty than by contingent alt-acs.

page 295.

Fragment: Agent Provocateur

Fragment from Silberman, Neil Asher. “Help Wanted: Choosing an Alternative or Mainstream Archaeological Career?” Journal of Eastern Mediterranian Archaeology and Heitage Studies 3, no. 3 (2015): 306–12. doi:10.5325/jeasmedarcherstu.3.3.0306. [http://www.jstor.org.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/stable/10.5325/jeasmedarcherstu.3.3.0306]

Through the 1980s and 1990s, I published a series of books and articles on the politics and hidden ideologies of archaeology. To some proper academic archaeologists that made me a “journalist,” to others, a “historian of archaeology,” and to others who held an especially reverent attitude toward the academic discipline, some kind of an agent provocateur. “You are doing a lot of damage,” a well-known publisher of a biblical archaeology magazine once told me. The wife of an up-and-coming scholar chastised me for not being respectful of real archaeologists. And so it went. Journalists assumed I was not one of them but an archaeologist, while archaeologists saw me as some sort of unconventional hanger-on.

pages 308-309.

Fragment: Revised Expectations

Fragment from Lichtheim, Miriam. Telling It Briefly : A Memoir of My Life. Fribourg: University Press, 1999.

A friendly shelter during my final year in Chicago was given me by Pierre Delougaz and his wife Natasha, who had a furnished room to spare. Living with them, and witnessing Natasha's prospering career as a librarian, gave me the idea that I too could become a professional librarian, and could thereby escape the uncertainties, indeed the unlikelihood, of obtaining a university position in Egyptology. Looking back on it, I wonder how I could have thought that a competent young Egyptologist could expect to obtain a professional position in a university or a museum. It was mere youthful ignorance.

page 35.

Fragment: voilà tout!

Fragment from Müller, F. Max. My Autobiography:  A Fragment. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1901.

One confession I have to make, and one for which I can hardly hope for absolution, whether from my friends or from my enemies. I have never done anything; I have never been a doer, a canvasser, a wirepuller, a manager, in the ordinary sense of these words. I have also shrunk from agitation, from clubs and from cliques, even from most respectable associations and societies. Many people would call me an idle, useless, and indolent man, and though I have not wasted many hours of my life, I cannot deny the charge that I have neither fought battles, nor helped to conquer new countries, nor joined any syndicate to roll up a fortune. I have been a scholar, a Stubengelehrter and voilà tout!

Much as I admired Ruskin when I saw him with his spade and wheelbarrow, encouraging and helping his undergraduate friends to make a new road from one village to another, I never myself took to digging, and shoveling, and carting. Nor could I quite agree with him, happy as I always felt in listening to him, when he said: " What we think, or what we know, or what we believe, is in the end of little consequence. The only thing of consequence is what we do." My view has always been the very opposite!

pages 308-309.