Though his book won the Society of Africanist Archaeologists Book Prize, Professor of Anthropology Scott MacEachern did not return from the ceremony in Dakar with a gold statuette commemorating the achievement.
"I think I got a beer out of it," he said, smiling. But though the prize itself may have been slight, the book's impact is sure to be less modest.
The book prize is awarded every two years to a work in the study of African prehistory. MacEachern's "Komé-Kribi: Rescue Archaeology Along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline, 1999-2004" won in November, and though his field work for Komé-Kribi ended more than six years ago, he will not have completely wrapped up his involvement with the project until he gives closing remarks at a conference this summer.
The project, with its 472 sites, was the largest archaeological project ever undertaken in Central Africa. MacEachern's involvement was intense but sporadic as he tried to balance his field work with time required for data analysis and his commitment to the classroom.
"This was the biggest archaeological project that ever happened in Central Africa, so one of my priorities was making sure that it got finished and got published," MacEachern said. He explained that many archaeologists struggle to stay in analyzing data when tempted by the call of the field.
The Komé-Kribi project was funded by a consortium of multinational oil companies. ExxonMobil headlined the sponsorship, as the company was building a pipeline across Cameroon and Southern Chad.
"You get archaeology being done often as part of...environmental protection on a project. Our goal in that case is to in the first place find the archaeological resources that are going to be affected by the pipeline," MacEachern explained.
MacEachern was the perfect choice for the project. He was familiar with the area, having worked in Central Africa since 1984; he speaks both English and French, crucial to success in the francophone nations Cameroon and Chad; and the work was in a particular type of archaeology called cultural resource management, MacEachern's specialty.
"Our goal is to locate archaeological remains or cultural heritage remains...prioritize them, decide which of the sites are significant for the cultural heritage of the countries involved...and then figure out some way to protect those ones that we deem significant," he said. "So it's like a multi-stage process: find them, prioritize them, protect them."
When prioritizing, MacEachern and his team were faced with the question: "What is an archaeological site?" At the outset of the project, MacEachern, a Belgian colleague and local archaeologists decided on criteria for what constituted cultural importance. All of the artifacts they considered to be part of the natural cultural heritage of Cameroon and Chad are now in laboratories and storage facilities that MacEachern and his team persuaded Exxon to build in those countries.
MacEachern can provide an animated list of the interesting things that he and his team came across most frequently.
"Huge amounts of pottery, pottery all over the place...stone tools, lots and lots of stone tools, some of the stone tools are a hundred thousand years old, they're just at the surface...they're just everywhere...there's stuff everywhere."
When pressed to highlight a particularly exciting find, MacEachern tentatively settled on a large group of iron-smelting sites he and the team found in Southern Chad.
"Particularly the Chadian ones were just incredible; they were all over the place. They dated to within about 150 or 200 years so it seems like people were doing a lot of iron-working in a very short period of time...about 1,000 years ago."
MacEachern was pleased, overall, with his interactions with his oil company employers, who he said would occasionally take a more than cursory interest in the archaeological work.
"Westerns tend to think that archaeology is cool. All of these Exxon executives are upper-middle class Americans and they've watched the History Channel...and once they see that we can do this work on time and on budget and in the correct manner, then they're all over it. They really get into it; they can see the public relations potential."
MacEachern said because it was funded by Exxon, the Komé-Kribi "was an unusual project" because it involved living in construction camps.
"The best way I can describe it is like living on a submarine...So Exxon builds these field camps along the pipeline and they sort of hermetically sealed off from Africa. I mean they've got barbed wire...you're living in little air conditioned trailers...they fly in Skippy peanut butter... It's weird and disturbing in a lot of ways," he said, though he did admit appreciation for the ability to take a hot shower.
He explained that Exxon wanted to take environmental concerns into account while constructing the pipeline.
"Their environmental protection inputs were, in a lot of ways, pretty sound from what I could see," he said. But he was quick to point out that oil extraction in Central Africa is a lot more guns than roses.
"I mean, particularly in Southern Chad there's a lot of banditry... I had bodyguards when we were doing the archaeology there," he said. He was also largely disappointed with the way that the project ended up affecting the local people.
"The World Bank was involved to some degree on the strength of the assumption that the Chadian government in particular, which is dictatorial, was going to use some of the proceeds of the oil extraction process...to benefit the people of Southern Chad...and they just didn't do it.... What they used the money for was to buy guns. The question becomes how much good does it do for the local people."
This question is particularly troubling for MacEachern, who his colleague, Associate Professor of Anthropology Susan Kaplan, describes as a fellow "anthropological archaeologist," or an archaeologist who investigates the past while dealing at the same time with the issues of living communities.
"Certainly that has been...a characteristic of his work throughout his career since he's been here and is one of the things that attracted us to hiring him many years ago. He can teach...cultural anthropology courses, dealing with contemporary issues of Africa but then he can turn around and talk about the prehistory of the region. So he's incredibly versatile as an academic and as a teacher that way," she said.
MacEachern himself explained that anthropological archaeology in Africa can be a difficult field to navigate, and not just on account of the terrain.
"I find myself torn because I've got a professional commitment to the protection of the archaeological record...on the other hand you see a project like that and you wonder what benefit it is to the local people. It's making a lot of Westerners rich and a lot of members of the elites of the two countries rich."
The publication of MacEachern's book was subsidized by Exxon, making its use in the classroom a possibility for many African archaeology students for whom it would have otherwise been prohibitively expensive.
Though he pointed out that general public interest in sub-Saharan archaeology can sometimes run dry after the early humans, MacEachern has received overwhelming support by Bowdoin in his Central African endeavors. He has not taught a class specifically tailored to his experiences, but he said that his students "know they can never get away from it."
Though he may be short one statuette, MacEachern is content with the knowledge of a job well done and the respect of his peers. Said Kaplan, "The field work he did is really huge, intensive field work. The fact that he was doing it in collaboration with so many countries and institutions...and he's been able to finesse all that, which is really an accomplishment, and produce a work that has academic integrity...that's certainly a major accomplishment."