Episode 223

Wendell Phillips: Pawn or Player?

This week: A brief catch-up sesh with Anna and Amber, who are both recovering from Covid (hence the late episode, sorry y'all!). Then, Amber guides us through her months of archival research, uncovering the real life and expeditions of her special boy, Wendell Phillips.

Wendell Phillips was a self-proclaimed archaeologist, adventurer, and founder of the American Foundation for the Study of Man. He was also a significant catalyst for the beginning of Arabian archaeology as a discipline in the 1950s. Most contemporary accounts of Phillips reduce him to a cartoonish, smooth-talking cowboy-wannabe buffoon who stumbled into oil concessions that made him a gajillionaire. But there's way more to Wendell Phillips than that. Come pull at the threads of this story with us--they lead to some fascinating places.

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The Dirt Podcast

Archaeology, Anthropology, and our shared human past.

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The Dirt Podcast

As science communicators in anthropology and archaeology, we hosts of The Dirt acknowledge that we hold a position of considerable privilege and opportunity, and commit ourselves to continuous learning, unlearning and reflection. We recognize that our disciplines, as well as our own lives, are rooted in and propped up by settler colonialism, white supremacy, and dispossession.

We now reside on the stolen ancestral territory of the Shawnee and Haudenosaunee and on the lands of the Muscogee and Cherokee Nations, but over its lifetime, The Dirt has also been produced on the unceded traditional territory of the Piscataway Conoy and Cedarville Band of Piscataway Indians, as well as that of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, Patwin and Miwok peoples and all those dispossessed by Cession 296. We offer our show as a platform for Indigenous scholarship, history, and cultural expression, through citation and conversation, and we welcome the opportunity to host and compensate Indigenous scholars of archaeology and anthropology as interview guests.

Likewise, we encourage all listeners who reside in settler-colonial states to learn about on whose land they reside, their place in the ongoing process of colonization, and how to contribute materially to reparations and Indigenous sovereignty.