The Impactful Field Research and Scholarship of Hetty Jo Brumbach and Robert Jarvenpa

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I first read the work of Hetty Jo Brumbach and Bob Jarvenpa early in my graduate training—and I was blown away. Their work has no doubt inspired both my field research and scholarship. The scholarly team has been at the very head of the line in new ways of thinking about ethnoarchaeology as a method and a science and especially in howwe signify aspects of identity in the present, and hope to identify it in the past. The team (individually and as co-authors) has produced exceptionalwork on such currently hot topics as Indigenous–colonial processes, nutrition, ethnicity, and field ethics. In this brief essay I will contain my comments to their exceptional ethnoarchaeological research, and specifically their focus on gender and subsistence and our reading and representation of such in the archaeological record. In thinking about this homage tomy intellectual heroes I havemarveled atwhat they have done together—and especially what they have accomplished in their ethnoarchaeological work. In their vast compendium of work they couple detailed empirical and methodological rigor with intellectual curiosity and interpretive flexibility and creativity. Throughout their prodigiously productive careers Jarvenpa and Brumbach have weighed in on a few of our most lively discourses without being pernicious intellectual bullies or hiding in a sea of distracting jargon. Instead theywrite witherudite accessibility—amodel for collegial andcomprehensible scholarship.They have also been consummate scientists and have conducted themselveswith the utmost of respect for the communities of Indigenous people they have consulted and been friends with for over four decades. They are a perfect team for research concerned with observing living people and understanding the material signatures that help archaeologists understand the complex dynamics of the past. In some ways their pairing has been an ethnoarchaeological dreamteam; Bob leaning more to the cultural side of symbolic and material studies and Hetty Jo to a more in-depth expertise in archaeological processes. However, the beauty is they overlap in their interests—their realms of expertise are different but always complementary. Being a gendered team has surely been a valuable scholarly foundation and a critical asset in the field; like the classic field work of Yolanda and Robert Murphy (2014) among the Mundurucu.