Shirley Booth-Blancke (NC 1954) has been given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Historical Commission of Concord, Massachusetts, where she lives. Shirley, who retired four years ago as the Curator of Concord Museum, spent 40 years amassing the data to tell 10,000 years of local Native American history up to the 17th century. This involved identifying, dating, and cataloging over 30,000 artifacts, originally in private collections, and arranging for the Concord Museum to take them in and curate them. She is now drafting a book on the topic.
Her previous book, The Way of Abundance and Joy: The Shamanic Teachings of don Alberto Taxo, explores the teachings of the eponymous Ecuadorian shaman and is available in the UK and the US. “I read Arch & Anth at Newnham from 1954-57, married an American, and relocated to the United States in 1960,” she tells us. “I worked in the Anthropology department at the American Museum of Natural History on new exhibits for the ‘Hall of Man in Africa’. We moved to Massachusetts in 1966, where I raised two children, got a PhD at Boston University, and then worked at the Concord Museum as a Curator.” Photo courtesy of Inner Traditions Bear & Company publishers.