4 - Writing historical archaeology

Summary

The way that we write our archaeological accounts is as much constitutive of our field as are the questions we think are significant and the ways we think those questions should be addressed (Joyce 2002). In writing, we seek to persuade others of our understandings, and to evoke from them a response. Whether the response we get is affirmative or contests our arguments, it is in the reception of our writing that we see ourselves connected to others in our discipline. It is through the engagement of scholars in exchanges that a body of accepted knowledge is produced. Through the same engagement, writers recognise themselves and are recognised as parts of a community of scholarship.

In this I consider how historical archaeology is shaped by particular forms of writing. Historical archaeology has produced some of the most sustained experiments in writing in the discipline of archaeology as a whole. I will be concerned particularly with the placements of the writer in relation to the subject that is typical in historical archaeological writing. I will suggest that what most distinguishes historical archaeology in writing is that the imaginary third party toward whose approval a text is oriented is distinct from those typical of other forms of archaeology.

Writing by historical archaeologists shows far more explicit engagement with problems of narrative and representation than most such work in other traditions of archaeology. Part of the reason for this difference may be a greater sense of the real historically situated persons whose lives and actions writers attempt to represent, created by the ability of historical archaeologists to engage with their subjects through documents as well as other forms of material culture. Another source of that sensibility undoubtedly is the routine engagement of historical archaeologists with living human beings who are often descendants of those whose life histories archaeology intersects. But it is not simply the existence of living people who will be affected by what they say that gives historical archaeologists a strong sense of responsibility for representation.