Walkover Country

'As the light plays on the Great Plains, Andrew Reinhard beckons us to accompany his muddy-booted walkover: months of surveying areas of archaeological import for cultural resource management companies before gas and oil pipelines are laid down. From soil colors to a stone scraper’s invisible fracture to a shovel’s Tao, Walkover Country slows readers down, shaping what we attend to-and learn to care about-through both well-known and obscure poetic forms.'  -Christine 'Mejukah' Weeber, Former poetry editor at SAPIENS Anthropology Magazine and author of In the Understory of Her Being and Sastrugi'Archaeology is in desperate need of more creative, more dynamic, more powerful ways of conveying the rich, multi-sensory experience of producing new knowledge about the past. This collection answers that call with compelling imagery and a broad, global, and historic range of poetic forms.'-Allison Mickel, PhD, Editor, Advances in Archaeological Practice, H. Bruce McEver Chair in Archaeological Science and Technologies Georgia Institute of Technology'Walkover Country is a lovely collection of poems inspired by archaeological field experiences in the Plains. As archaeologists, we rarely take the time to recognize the oddity or specialness of our everyday experiences in the field, and Dr. Reinhard’s collection does an excellent job of painting pictures with words and illuminating what we see, experience, find, and interact with while working on the Plains. -Kim Redman, President/General Manager, Alpine Archaeological Consultants, Inc.'Melding careful attention to meter with contemporary themes, Reinhard’s poetry offers a gritty, textured, stratigraphic contribution to the tradition of the archaeologist poet. By setting his verse amid the shovel tests, survey transects, and lonely hotel rooms of the Great Plains, he plays, sometimes mercilessly, with any romantic notion of archaeology and lingers on the rougher overburden of crunching gravel, trowel-scraped sediments, and aching muscles. Archaeologist poets stand in the interstices between disciplinary conventions and maybe it is their commitment to understanding the past that gives their work its enduring quality. There is little doubt that the volume will continue to capture the imagination of archaeologists and the experience of fieldwork for generations to come.'-William Caraher, PhD, Associate Professor, History and American Indian Studies University of North Dakota'Reinhard’s collection of poems is a tribute to the field archaeologist and doing archaeology across the northern Plains. His poems sang to me and made me long for the field. I have walked across similar landscapes and experienced similar things that Reinhard writes. Poems about trowels, Knife River Flint, and rainy days - the life of an archaeologist. '-Patrick D. Trader, MA, RPA, Senior Principal Investigator Gray & Pape, Inc.