Susan Kardas

Born: 1947, United States
Died: 2016
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Unknown

The following is republished from the National Park Service. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).

In 1968, the first female archaeological investigator at Fort Vancouver, Susan Kardas, started excavations at the Village site. Kardas had been educated at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and received her doctorate in Anthropology from Bryn Mawr College in 1971. Her Ph.D. dissertation is based on the research she conducted at the Fort Vancouver Village, discussed below.
Before working at Fort Vancouver, Kardas worked with James Deetz from 1962 to 1964 at La Purisima Mission in California, where she served as a surveyor and laboratory director. She continued this work at Louisbourg, Nova Scotia in 1965 and at Fort Kentucky in Sackets Harbor, New York (Kardas 1971: 437). She also conducted a survey of the upper Columbia River in 1966. Her mentors at Bryn Mawr were Frederica de Laguna and Jane Goodale, both sociocultural anthropologists. De Laguna, in particular, had used archaeology to augment the ethnographic record at contact-period American Indian sites in the Pacific Northwest (Cotter 1993, de Laguna 1960).
Kardas, along with her husband and fellow archaeologist Edward Larrabee, were hired to survey the Fort Vancouver Village area in 1968 (Kardas 1971). After Fort Vancouver, Kardas and Larrabee continued to work in contract and salvage archaeology. They formed the contracting firm Historic Sites Research that operated in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1975, and later in Hurricane, Utah (Reed College 2006).
Kardas and Larrabee’s co-authored report documented the results of the 1968 excavations in the Village. It was described by National Park Service Director John Rutter as one of the “finest” reports he had ever received.
To provide funding for her dissertation work and additional excavations, Kardas solicited Congresswoman Julia Butler Hansen with a proposal for $2,500 for a second year of research at the Village. The role of women archaeologists in the field was neither secure nor typical in the 1960s, and Kardas was acutely aware of the challenges for a female scholar in a male-dominated field. She wrote to Congresswoman Hansen: “My chances of getting the money may also be lessened because I am a woman, and archaeology unfortunately is still not fully open to them” (Merritt 1993: 148). On her behalf, Congresswoman Hansen, who was likewise a pioneer in the male-dominated field of politics – provided encouragement for National Park Service Director George Hartzog to fund the excavation and to create a joint field school with Bryn Mawr and the University of Washington. The resulting field school included five female students from Bryn Mawr.
In the Administrative History of Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, Merrit (1993) notes the prickly interactions between Kardas and Larrabee and the staffs of the University of Washington and the National Park Service, including a particularly nasty exchange with a state highway archaeologist in the field. Merrit details a number of letters from Kardas to Congresswoman Hansen complaining about discriminatory behavior towards her and her students. While Larrabee was designated the field director of both the 1968 and 1969 projects, Kardas’ dissertation was clearly the dominant aspect of the research and she had substantial influence in the fieldwork design, conducting most of the analysis and report writing.
The excavations identified four house sites (identified as Houses 1, 2, 3, and 4) and a number of extramural pits, including animal burials, and concentrations of rock. Kardas also authored the 1970 report titled “1969 Excavations at the Kanaka Village Site, Fort Vancouver, Washington.” The work culminated in her 1971 doctoral dissertation titled The People Bought This and the Clatsop Became Rich. Kardas’ project in the Fort Vancouver Village centered on the anthropological exploration of culture contact and culture change. It focused on the social history and ethnohistory of the fur trade community, in particular the lives of Native Hawaiian men and Native American women, primarily Chinookans (Kardas 1971). Her study analyzed and synthesized historical, ethnographic, and archaeological data in a manner that aimed to “yield a picture [of the fur trade community] which is far more meaningful than that given by any one method alone” (Kardas 1971: 1).
These excavations illustrate the shift in archaeological studies towards the exploration of colonial contexts from the perspective of identity, including race and gender, and the use of artifacts and features combined with historical and ethnographic data to build a better understanding of the social relations in a multiethnic community. Kardas’ dissertation attempted to elaborate on the relationships between the various ethnic groups that lived in the Fort Vancouver Village, especially Native Americans and Native Hawaiians. Unfortunately for Kardas, most of the materials she recovered were British or European in origin, probably purchased from the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) “Sale Shop,” which was the principal retail outlet for the employees of the Company, early missionaries, and Oregon Trail settlers. The methods by which archaeologists attempted to identify ethnicity in the 1960s focused on “ethnic markers,” like diagnostic stone tools (e.g., projectile points), precluding careful analysis of the ways in which domestic artifacts and consumables, including foods, furnishings, and implements, might address practices tied to the identity of individuals.


Posted in Archaeology.