The best way to be brief is to imitate the most illustrious short speech of history – si licet parva componere magnis…
Here we go – as Jim would say…
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One score and seventeen years ago is when my friendship with Jim began. Young assistant professors, we were both adjusting to the UCLA institutional scene, at the same time that we were seeking our place in the realm of thought.
Let me propose this to you as a first beautiful aspect of Jim’s personality: how to blend the institutional and the intellectual in a harmonious whole, rather than insisting on a disconnect that can easily lead to either administrative boredom or scholarly sterility.
And here is a second: how to blend experience and analysis – or, if you will (in more technical terms) the humanistic and the scientific. That was, for me as I think it must be for all, a stimulus and a comfort – a stimulus to go beyond established frames and the comfort that we are still carried by tradition.
It is to celebrate Jim’s inimitable presence on the stage of UCLA archaeology that we want him to have, today, the symbol of our profession. And so, we have come to dedicate a portion of our toolkit, the humble, the noble trowel, with Jim’s name.
It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. It celebrates Jim for what he is and for what he has brought to us.
But in a larger sense, we want to take to heart his teaching; we want to appropriate the values he has shown us over the years and shows us today with ever renewed freshness; we want to go to the heart of the matter rather than gawk at the mirage of fashion.
And so it is that, in the wake of his accomplishments, we resolve that archaeology as both an art and a science shall not perish from the earth.