About the Author
William B. Trousdale is Emeritus Curator of Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, where he worked for three decades. Prior to that, he was Associate Curator of Chinese Art at the Freer Gallery of the Smithsonian. Trousdale had visiting appointments at Columbia University, University of Michigan, and University of Oregon. His PhD in Asian Art History and Archaeology came from the University of Michigan, and he received his masters from UC Berkeley in East Asian Studies. Trousdale’s field research was conducted primarily in the southwestern Sistan region, where he directed the Helmand Sistan Project (1971–76) and elsewhere in Afghanistan (1960–78), but he also served as Assistant Director of the Qasr al-Hayr excavations in Syria for six seasons. He has published on the archaeology of Afghanistan and Syria, on nineteenth-century British involvement in Afghanistan and Central Asia, and on military academies. Books and monographs include The Long Sword and Scabbard Slide in Asia (Smithsonian 1975), City in the Desert (coauthored, Harvard UP, 1978), War in Afghanistan 1879–80 (Wayne State UP 1985), The Gordon Creeds in Afghanistan (British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia 1984), and Military High Schools in America (Left Coast 2009). He is currently working on final publication of the archaeological fieldwork in Sistan and an ethnographic volume on the same region.
Edited by Mitchell Allen and Cyndi Maurer, Scholarly Roadside Service. Mitchell Allen is a retired scholarly book publisher who runs a consulting service for academics and scholarly publishers. He is an archaeologist by training (PhD, UCLA) and did several years of archaeological work with Trousdale in Afghanistan before launching his forty-year publishing career. Cyndi Maurer has a PhD in Childhood Studies (Rutgers University) and is an educational researcher as well as publishing consultant.