Abstract
Susan Kent was an anomaly as an archaeologist. A short, plump woman, often dressed in pink, she was the antithesis of Flannery's Real Archaeologist, the guy dressed in faded khakis, eyes squinting in a weather‐beaten face, pipe in the left hand and Marshalltown in the right. (“A guy named Sue”?) Yet Kent was an indefatigable fieldworker in inhospitable lands. In a career in which substantial significant, often‐cited publications are the key to advancement, Kent was author or editor of a series of major contributions to the discipline, yet she remained in a provincial service‐oriented university, one of two women making up the anthropology program. A great range of archaeologists acknowledge a deep debt to Kent's guidance and kindness—nurturing, in a word—yet she was sharp in analysis and vigorous in debate on theory. Philosophers of science, beginning with Kuhn, credit anomalies with extraordinary power to clarify the normal science of a field. This is so with Susan Kent: examining her contributions and career brings out the real models and practices of American archaeology in the late 20th century.
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