Veronica Peterson | Seeing Like An Archeologist
The Department of Anthropology at Harvard University is pleased to share an essay by recent PhD graduate Veronica Peterson, titled “Seeing Like an Archaeologist,” via The Republic of Letters on Substack.
I’m not certain of much these days, but this I know: I will be an archaeologist until I die.
Just a month into the vague state of being that has descended upon me after completing the terminal degree in my field, friends and family call me “Dr. Peterson” with love and pride. But since I am not going to be a professor, as far into the future as I can see, the conferral of the title does not seem to bear any of the rights and privileges one witnesses in the academy: no deferential students, no staff catering to my whims, no administration filing the documents of my transgressions into a cabinet made from a black hole. Lest you worry, this is not an airing of grievances. It’s actually a love letter. But lately, as I emerge in agonizing fits and starts, bleary eyed and feral, from the cavernous depths of discipline, I have been questioning if it’s that wrong for archaeology to be woven so thoroughly into my identity?
To learn more about Peterson, visit her website here.