Larry ZimmermanA Collaborative Anthropologist at the Trowel’s Edge Alyssa Boge (bio) At the end of this academic year Dr. Larry Zimmerman will retire from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (iupui) after thirteen years as professor of anthropology and Museum Studies and Public Scholar of Native American Representation, a position shared with the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art. His career has spanned more than forty years, has taken him to various states and countries, and has affected many people (including this author). Although he never imagined the direction his career would take, his work has always revolved around collaborative anthropology. During a Skype interview I conducted recently with Dr. Zimmerman, I learned more about what he and his colleagues have referred to as “a random walk to public scholarship” (Holzman et al. 2014). Long before Zimmerman earned his PhD he was a kid growing up on a farm in Iowa, collecting arrowheads. As he explained, I had no idea what was going on except that they were pretty and they had to do with Indians… then we moved and I forgot about it all. I went off to college and took my first Intro to Cultural Anthropology class. I mentioned the arrowhead collecting to my professor who said, “Go down to the state archaeologist’s office and talk with them; you should do some archaeological field school stuff,” which I did, and I was hooked. He worked on some very interesting excavations and began to realize how many people are involved in the process of archaeology, including [End Page 114] landowners, collectors, and the public. He realized that he also enjoyed working with people. In his senior year of college Zimmerman did fieldwork in post-contact Aztec sites around Teotihuacan. It was there that he developed his social conscience. He was working with a very different group of people than those with whom he had worked before, and he saw the power differentials between the undergraduate students and the Mexican workers. Although the Mexican workers had done archaeological fieldwork longer and were better at it than the students, they had no real agency. As Zimmerman explained it to me, “It got to be the kind of thing that told me I wanted to be doing something else with archaeology.” During his fieldwork he had another experience that would foreshadow much of his later work: We took our workers to the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City where none of them had been before. I remember finding one of them—Alejandro—standing, crying, in front of the big Aztec calendar stone. I went over to him and said, “Alejandro, what’s going on? Is something wrong?” and he said, “No, I just never realized how great my people really were.” That was an important moment in my life, when I began to understand how important archaeology is to the people you’re studying. It got to be more interesting than just dealing with old stones, faunal materials, and the like. You begin to understand that the kinds of things archaeologists find are not just mere curiosities. They’re things that are really important to people. Sometimes they don’t even understand how important it is to them, so you can be the person who can interpret it for them a bit and help them make the connections between their present and their own past. That’s kind of exciting when that happens. However, it was not until later that his collaborative work would begin. Few anthropologists during the late 1960s were working with communities as partners or on issues of repatriation. Zimmerman was no different. He recalled working on a project in Iowa. Remains from an 1860s pioneer period cemetery needed to be moved for a new highway. The remains of white people were reburied right away in a local cemetery, but the remains of an Indian woman were taken to the lab of the state archaeologist for study. Maria Pearson, an Inhanktonwan (Yankton Sioux) woman found out about it and went to the governor demanding that the [End Page 115] Native American and white remains should be treated equally. Although Zimmerman understood her argument, he would...