In Memoriam

In MemoriamA Tribute to Sarah M. Nelson (29 November 1931–27 April 2020) Gina L. Barnes, Fumiko Ikawa-Smith, and Katheryn M. Linduff Click for larger view View full resolution Sarah Nelson receiving award from Wellesley, 16 February 2012 (Courtesy of Richard Howard Photography, Winchester, MA) Sarah Milledge Nelson died on 27 April 2020 in Denver, Colorado, where she had lived and taught at the University of Denver since 1974. Her career spanned a period when the field of American Anthropology grew to embrace both East Asia and gender studies as central to investigation and scholarship. Sarah's contribution to these subfields was immense—through her writings, positions as an academic and professional administrator, and as a mentor not only to students, but also her colleagues. All of this she accomplished effectively with a deft and quiet demeanor that led by example and never by command or targeted confrontation. [End Page 232] In these pursuits, Sarah deliberately wrote without jargon or pedantry. Her books include seven on archaeology (at the time of her death, she was working on a second edition of The Archaeology of Korea), three on women and gender in archaeology, and three novels centered on women in prehistoric Korea. For the novels, she established her own publishing unit, RKLOG Press, to bring archaeology to life in reimagining the past. The effect of her activities was long-lasting and deep. Sarah was a renowned pioneer in bringing Korean archaeology to western attention through her dissertation work on the Korean Neolithic and then by writing The Archaeology of Korea (1993) for the Cambridge World Archaeology series. However, in common with many scholars, Sarah's choice of career subject was serendipitous. Having majored in Biblical history at Wellesley (B.A. awarded 1953), she knew she wanted to be an archaeologist, but she married early and had three sons in short order. Following her medic husband to Europe, she enrolled in archaeology classes, then went to Ann Arbor, where both she and her husband studied, and entered the MA program in the University of Michigan's Department of Anthropology. Still without a dissertation topic when she passed her preliminary exams in 1969, she first tried to take her three sons to Taiwan to do research there, but, frustrated by the visa system, she ended up accompanying her husband on a year-long tour of duty to Korea. It was there that she grasped opportunities to do fieldwork and fortuitously began a career in Korean archaeology. The dead-ends and switch-backs of this period resulted in a ferocious tenacity and flexibility that characterized the rest of her research life; these qualities still serve as a model of fortitude in achieving whatever is possible under the circumstances. Sarah's dissertation on the Han River settlement system in Korea was facilitated by tuition in Korean and by teaming up with Im Hyo-jai, an Assistant Lecturer at that time at Seoul National University. Whereas other University of Michigan students were expected to organize their own fieldwork projects, it would have been impossible for Sarah to do so in an East Asian country. Joining Im's survey project gave her the scope to introduce new techniques such as test-pitting and flotation, with their results forming the basis of her 1973 doctoral thesis on the subsistence patterns of lowland and upland areas (published in 1975). This regional divergence was marked by different pottery styles. Not only did her work with Im provide the first empirical proof that the ceramic styles were successive, it also brought attention to invoking ethnicity to explain changes in subsistence systems through time. Food production became an important focus in her subsequent research. Tracing the advent of millet agriculture drew her to the Manchurian Basin, where her Chinese language studies served her well. Later she participated in a symposium on the introduction of rice to the Korean Peninsula from China. Her interests, however, transcended the daily grind as she investigated the social structure of Neolithic sites in Korea and analyzed the impact of agriculture on sociopolitical development. She collected her writings on these subjects into a volume in 2004 entitled Korean Social Archaeology. Sarah first visited China in 1981

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