Notice Board

On Saturday, Sept. 21, we received sad but not wholly unexpected news that our mentor, and former colleague, Walter “Wally” E. Aufrecht had passed away. While Wally had been ill for a while, this came as a surprise to many of us who knew him well. A Professor Emeritus of Archaeology in the Department of Geography & Environment, Wally spent close to thirty years at the University of Lethbridge. He retired in 2008, although Wally returned to teach Hebrew the following year because he enjoyed that subject so much. His physical presence on campus gradually lessened since then, but the impact he made on our university was important and continues to do this day.

First arriving in Lethbridge in 1981, Wally quickly became something of a notorious figure on campus, (mostly) beloved by his students but often known for his fierce temper in university meetings. He was never, ever, reluctant to speak his mind and the term “apoplectic” was often used to describe his response to decisions he disagreed with. We can’t really imagine what it was like to be a university dean having to discuss matters with Wally, given his frequent refrain that “there is no salvation in administration.” Despite the bluster, Wally truly valued service to the university and to the department and when he would be seeming to lose his temper it was because of the deep love that he had for this institution. Even now, we often ask each other, what Wally would have thought if he was still working here.

While many across campus would have experienced Wally’s loud harangues during meetings, really it was his sense of humour that defined his personality. At the same time that Wally would be vociferously arguing a point, he would also be finding the comedy in the situation. His sardonic wit was perhaps one of his most consistent qualities and one could often hear his laugh echoing through University Hall. This mixture of qualities made him feel at home in the (then called) Department of Geography, despite the fact that his own academic training had little to do with the Earth Sciences. He often praised Geography for being a department where people could disagree during meetings and then all go out for beer together afterwards.

What may not be as well known to members of the University of Lethbridge community is what an important scholar Wally was in his own field, the study of ancient Near Eastern languages. His PhD was in Aramaic, the language that Jesus was thought to have spoken, a language closely related to Hebrew. He made many contributions to Aramaic studies throughout his career. But perhaps his most noteworthy contribution was his work on the Ammonite language, a language spoken in Jordan three thousand years ago within the kingdom of Ammon, a polity known from the Old Testament. He literally wrote the book on this language and was one of the most important scholars in the world who contributed to us learning to read it again. He was widely known in the field of Levantine archaeology, and the importance of his research put the University of Lethbridge “on the map” of Near Eastern studies.

In January of 2020, a group of scholars gathered at the University of Lethbridge and Waterton National Park to celebrate Wally and his contributions to the study of Jordan. There we announced that it was the first of the Walter E. Aufrecht Occasional Workshops in Archaeology. The COVID-19 pandemic interrupted plans for a follow-up workshop but another is in its planning stages and through these workshops we hope to continue to celebrate Wally, his contributions to the field, and his contributions to the University of Lethbridge.

As one of our colleagues said upon hearing of Wally’s passing, “he made Lethbridge the most disproportionally represented place in Near Eastern archaeology.” This was not just because of the prominence of his research. It was also due to the Archaeology program that he created here on campus. When Wally started teaching Archaeology at the UofL, the courses were seen as service courses, not courses designed to support a program of their own. Archaeology 1000 was a “rocks for jocks” kind of class, allowing students to meet their liberal education requirements. Archaeology classes were offered through the Geography Department as an accident of personnel issues. Yet Wally foresaw how the field of archaeology was changing and how important the techniques, tools, and theoretical approaches of geography were to become in the future. Now the skills taught in Geography are expected of archaeologists and what had once been an anomalous program in the academy has come to be a model for how archaeology should be positioned. Still, there is some comedy in that our Department of Geography & Environment is the only such department in the world where ancient Hebrew language is taught as a regular course offering.

It was not just Wally’s foresight about how archaeology was evolving that fostered the growth of the discipline on campus. Wally truly loved teaching and he had a vision of mentorship that extended well beyond the classroom. His lecture style was charismatic and exciting, and he was able to draw in all of his audience. He believed in the importance of field experiences for students and took groups of undergraduates to the Middle East throughout the late 1980s and 1990s. Wally pushed his students and was able to identify their own unique skills that could be used in the field and encouraged them to apply to the top graduate programs in the world. At one time, for example, Harvard Divinity School had three former University of Lethbridge students enrolled in its graduate programs, with others having attended before and after.

Wally’s mentorship did not end when a student graduated from the University of Lethbridge. He saw mentorship as a lifelong responsibility, and he continued to mentor several of us in his final years. Many of his students had the opportunity to learn to teach under his tutelage. When funding was much more readily available for sessionals, he would have his former students come back and teach at the U of L in the summer semesters. While we were teaching our own classes for the first time, Wally worked with us, sharing his years of classroom experience and the pedagogical tools he had crafted. His vision of teaching that extends far beyond the classroom continues to inspire our teaching in the Archaeology program to this day and many of our successful teaching approaches have been unapologetically appropriated from him.

Wally truly shared the vision of the University of Lethbridge that had been established by its founders. He saw the University of Lethbridge as a pillar of intellectual engagement in southern Alberta. He valued and encouraged the explicitly multi-disciplinary liberal education that students receive here and saw their education as his utmost priority. Wally understood that a UofL liberal education was rooted in engagement with high quality research and that active research programs were what made this institution stand out. Though we will miss Wally dearly, we hope to carry on his legacy with our own research and teaching at the University of Lethbridge.

A professional obituary circulated to the Near Eastern studies community is available here.

Kevin McGeough & Shawn Bubel
Department of Geography & Enviornment