This fascinating book is partly a detective story in which Alan Kaiser relentlessly tracks down the appropriation of Mary Ross Ellingson's intellectual property by David Robinson, her major professor, partly a recounting of the ways classical archaeology was practiced in the academic world of the 1930s, and partly an examination of Ellingson's career, including the consequences of the theft of her work. The book is a good read as well as a mine of information about the history of classical archaeology, told in an engaging way. Probing the past of archaeological practice is priceless, especially examining the sexism which allowed the facile and guiltless stealing of the work of students, especially women, as if students in general and women in particular had no rights to their own intellectual property.
The tale of a major archaeologist who published a woman student's work under his own name should be more shocking than...
