Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T14:30:06.209Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Excavation methodologies and labour as epistemic concerns in the practice of archaeology. Comparing examples from British and Andean archaeology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 May 2015

Mary Leighton
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Archaeologists’ excavation practices vary significantly from country to country and site to site. But variation in the most fundamental, ‘common-sense’ excavation practices is ‘black-boxed’ - it is not discussed outside casual, informal contexts, and is treated as having no effect on higher-level interpretation. These practices can, however, be a source of conflict when archaeologists from different communities of practice work together. In this paper, I explore what variation in excavation methodology reveals about the nature of archaeological knowledge itself. By comparing methodologies and the organization of labour on British and Andean excavations, I argue that archaeologists in different communities of practice have divergent understandings of what the object of archaeological investigation is, and of how it can be known, and by whom. This results in contrasting understandings of the nature of material/archaeological objects, as well as contrasting conceptualizations of excavation as an ‘expert’ practice – one requiring skills, knowledge and bodily practices that are specific to trained archaeologists. Situating these concerns in historical and ethnographic context, this paper suggests that archaeological excavation is, in fact, a far more complex, nuanced and variable practice than the lack of attention paid to it implies.

Keywords

methodsexcavationhistory and ethnography of archaeologyAndean archaeologyBritish archaeologyscience studies
Type
Articles
Information
Archaeological Dialogues , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , June 2015 , pp. 65 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anderson, B., 1983: Imagined communities. Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, London.Google Scholar
Berggren, A., and Hodder, I., 2003: Social practice, method, and some problems of field archaeology, American antiquity 68, 421–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berrett, D., 2010: Anthropology without science, Inside higher education, 30 November 2010, available at www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/11/30/anthroscience, accessed 10 March 2015.Google Scholar
Collins, H.M., 2001: Tacit knowledge, trust and the Q of sapphire, Social studies of science 31, 71–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collis, J., 2001: Digging up the past. An introduction to archaeological excavation, Stroud.Google Scholar
Daston, L.J., and Galison, P., 2007: Objectivity, New York.Google Scholar
Edgeworth, M., 2003: Acts of discovery. An ethnography of archaeological practice, Oxford.Google Scholar
Everill, P., 2007: British commercial archaeology. Antiquarians and labourers, developers and diggers, in Hamilakis, Y. and Duke, P. (eds), Archaeology and capitalism. From ethics to politics, London, 119–36.Google Scholar
Everill, P., 2009: The invisible diggers. A study of British commercial archaeology, Vol. 1, Oxford.Google Scholar
Farid, S., Cessford, C., Berggren, A., Cooper, A., Turnbull, R., Baysal, A., Leaver, S., Boyer, P., Cawdron, T., Hamilton, N., Hawkes, L., Knight, M. and Webb, S., 2003: The excavation process at Çatalhöyük, in Hodder, I. (ed.), Towards reflexive method in archaeology. The example at Çatalhöyük, Cambridge, 19–35.Google Scholar
Harris, E.C., 1989: Principles of archaeological stratigraphy, 2nd edn, London.Google Scholar
Harris, E.C. and Ottaway, P.J., 1976: A recording experiment on a rescue site, Rescue archaeology 10, 6–7.Google Scholar
Hodder, I., 1986: Reading the past. Current approaches to interpretation in archaeology, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Holtorf, C., 2002: Notes on the life history of a pot sherd, Journal of material culture 7, 49–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holtorf, C., 2006: Archaeology is a brand! The meaning of archaeology in contemporary popular culture, Oxford.Google Scholar
Knorr Cetina, K., 1999: Epistemic cultures. How the sciences make knowledge, Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar
Knorr Cetina, K., forthcoming: The mediatization of the face-to-face situation. Scopic media and global coordination, in Lundby, K. (ed.), Handbooks of communication science, Vol. 21, Mediatization of communication, Berlin.Google Scholar
Latour, B., and Woolgar, S., 1979: Laboratory life. The social construction of scientific facts, Beverly Hills, CA.Google Scholar
Leighton, M., 2014: Uneven fields. Transnational expertise and the practice of Andean archaeology, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago.Google Scholar
Lucas, G., 2001: Critical approaches to fieldwork. Contemporary and historical archaeological practice, London.Google Scholar
Sammells, C., 2013: Complicating the local. Defining the Aymara at Tiwanaku, Bolivia, International journal of historical archaeology 17 (2), 315–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shanks, M., and McGuire, R.H., 1996: The craft of archaeology, American antiquity 61 (1), 75–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shapin, S., 2008: The scientific life. A moral history of a late modern vocation, Chicago.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shapin, S., and Schaffer, S., 1985: Leviathan and the air-pump. Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life, Princeton, NJ.Google Scholar
Smith, M.E., 2010: Anthropology is not a science – American Anthropological Association, available at http://publishingarchaeology.blogspot.com/2010/12/anthropology-is-not-science-american.html, accessed 22 October 2014.Google Scholar
Swartley, L., 2002: Inventing indigenous knowledge. Archaeology, rural development, and the raised field rehabilitation project in Bolivia, New York.Google Scholar
Tilley, C., 1989: Excavation as theatre, Antiquity 63, 61–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wood, P., 2010: Anthropology Association rejecting science, Chronicle of higher education, 29 November 2010, available at http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/anthropology-association-rejecting-science/27936, accessed 10 March 2015.Google Scholar
Yarrow, T., 2003: Artefactual persons. The relational capacities of persons and things in the practice of excavation, Norwegian archaeological review 36, 65–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yarrow, T., 2006: Sites of knowledge. Different ways of knowing an archaeological excavation, in Edgeworth, M. (ed.), Ethnographies of archaeological practice. Cultural encounters, material transformations, Lanham, MD, 20–32.Google Scholar