Scholarly Networks, Gender Sociology, and Knowledge Production in Aegean Survey and Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology

Abstract

The concept of the “network” has become increasingly popular in archaeology over the past two decades (see Mills 2017 for a helpful review). Composed of “nodes” (actors, locations, or assemblages) and “edges” (the connections or flows between different nodes), networks are used to formally represent a wide array of relationships between people, places, and things. In Mediterranean and Near Eastern archaeology, network theory has been invoked to understand phenomena as diverse as mobility, maritime connectivity, economic exchange, identity formation, knowledge production, and the development of shared cultural and religious practices across long distances (Malkin 2011; Leidwanger and Knappett 2018; Robson 2019; Leidwanger 2020).In this intellectual milieu, it is unsurprising that networks have been used to depict the structure of the discipline of archaeology itself or its various subfields (Roberts et al. 2020). One recent contribution, for example, considers the development of survey methodology in the Aegean (chiefly in Greece) through the lens of “intellectual genealogy” (Loy 2020). Michael Loy constructs scholarly networks with shared project directors acting as “edges” that connect different project “nodes,” creating a series of family trees that link survey projects to their “siblings” (projects with overlapping directors or senior staff) and “direct descendants” (projects directed by students or mentees of previous directors). These genealogical relationships, Loy argues, have greatly shaped different schools of thought about method in Aegean survey, especially since the late 1980s and early 1990s, when two interlocking networks centered around Cambridge archaeologists on the one hand and John Cherry and Jack Davis on the other begat a diverse group of methodological “descendants.”Scholarly networks are doubtless an integral part of archaeological knowledge production and transmission. Most archaeologists would not deny that our advisors, mentors, colleagues, and friends shape our view of the field and our conceptions of appropriate archaeological practice, and we should expect to find links between the artifact collection strategies employed on Aegean surveys and the personal or professional relationships between survey personnel. Relationships like these often have a positive and collaborative aspect: archaeological fieldwork can be a venue where traditional hierarchies between professor and student or director and staff are de-emphasized, leading to a convivial flow of ideas. However, scholarly networks can also foster exclusivity, exacerbating underlying inequalities rather than alleviating them (see Leighton 2020 for how the “performative informality” of fieldwork can reinforce hierarchies of power based on class and gender).In this Forum, inspired in part by Loy’s initial investigation, we would like to turn a critical eye on the social networks of eastern Mediterranean archaeology. As two PhD candidates who have worked as graduate student staff on multiple regional surveys in Greece, we focus on gender sociology and knowledge production within the subfield of Aegean survey, particularly on survey projects conducted in Greece and Cyprus.1 Through analysis of both survey directorship and survey publication teams, we clarify several major questions. Whom do scholarly networks of survey directors omit? And what do we miss when we view the development of survey (1) from a top-down perspective, as the creation and legacy of project directors, and (2) with a focus on field methods and artifact collection rather than the interpretation of survey data? Five archaeologists with field experience in the eastern Mediterranean then discuss these questions as they relate to their own experience and area of specialization. We thank all of the contributors for sharing their perspectives and research on this topic.As we examined the Aegean survey projects studied by Loy, a gender imbalance in the directorship of Aegean surveys became immediately apparent.2 Loy’s sample includes 21 Anglo-American pedestrian survey projects conducted in the Aegean between 1972 and 2019. While this is by no means a comprehensive list of Aegean surveys over the past fifty years, it can serve as a guide to general trends. Out of 52 survey directors listed in Loy’s table, 13 (25%) are women (this calculation includes Sue Alcock as a director of the Phlius urban survey, which she conducted under the aegis of the Nemea Valley Archaeological Project). Several individuals are listed as directors of multiple survey projects, and so the total number of individuals in the table is 40—29 men and 11 women—meaning that male directors outnumber female directors by a ratio of nearly 3:1 (Fig. 1). This difference is both pronounced and statistically significant when compared to an “expected” 50–50 male-female split in directorship: X2 (1, N = 52) = 6.93, p = 0.01 (for directors), X2 (1, N = 40) = 4.27, p = 0.04 (for individuals represented). While 11 of the surveys Loy cites have no female directors, only one has no male director (Lucia Nixon’s and Jenny Moody’s Sphakia Survey). The majority of the surveys studied by Loy took place in Greece (18 out of 21). Loy’s list of directors includes several Greek women, but no Greek men. This may be related to high levels of representation of women in archaeology in Greece and particularly in Greek ephoreias (the term for the regional branches of the Greek Archaeological Service). While historical data on these trends are difficult to acquire, a study conducted in early 2008 showed that women occupied 62% of teaching positions in Greek university archaeology departments and 75% of museum and ephoreia directorships in the Greek Archaeological Service (Kokkinidou and Nikolaidou 2009: 35–37).Loy’s table is not complete, as he admits, and it omits some Anglo-American survey projects in Greece with female directors, including the Vrokastro Survey Project (VSP), directed by Barbara Hayden and Jenny Moody, and the recent Bays of East Attica Regional Survey (BEARS), directed by Sarah Murray and Catherine Pratt. Neither of these projects fits easily into Loy’s scheme, and their methods are likewise distinct from the “Cherry-Davis” method of intensive survey. The VSP employed sampling methods based on different ecological zones as well as intensive on-site collection (Hayden 2004; see Haggis 2004 for comment), while BEARS combined traditional intensive and extensive survey methods with gridded collection of diagnostics at known sites in order to answer targeted research questions (Murray et al. 2021: 342–49). However, the gender disparities evident in Loy’s list deserve some comment, as they may indicate that the scholarly networks Loy describes do not benefit survey archaeologists of different genders equally. The exclusive nature of certain networks of mentorship was highlighted in a recent BMCR review of a 2018 Festschrift for John Cherry: though praising the volume as a whole, the reviewer notes that only two out of 19 contributors to the volume are women (Gori 2020). Festschriften can be considered to some extent the printed manifestations of mentor–mentee “networks,” and so it is perhaps not surprising that the gender imbalances in this publication mirror the larger ones in the social world of Aegean survey, even if this imbalance is not consciously fostered by editors or contributors.This trend is not unique to the Aegean. A recent study by Bauer and Nakhai examined 155 Festschriften or memorial volumes related to the archaeology of the southern Levant between 1908 and 2018. Less than 10% of honorees were women, and only 14% in the decade between 2008 and 2018 (Bauer and Nakhai 2018). Women are underrepresented among contributors to Festschriften as well: only 20% of contributors to Festschriften published between 2008 and 2018 were women, excluding co-authored contributions (Nakhai pers. comm.; see also Nakhai’s response below). If we assume that contributors to Festschriften are often drawn from among an honoree’s students and mentees, then we may be observing a dynamic where male archaeologists tend to attract more male students in the first place, or where male students tend to remain in academia at a higher rate than female students, or where women in academia are disproportionately burdened by service and family responsibilities and thus take on fewer publication projects. While further study would be required to understand the underlying causes of these larger trends, a combination of all of these factors seems likely.We also note that the “scholarly networks” Loy identifies center around elite universities (the Cambridge network) or around a handful of prominent individuals at the top of their fields (the Cherry-Davis network). This is not unexpected and likely finds parallels in many other academic disciplines and even other subfields of archaeology. While a similar gender imbalance exists in the directorship of archaeological excavations in Greece (see below), one wonders if a network analysis of excavation directors would show quite the same degree of clustering. In sum, Loy’s work suggests that in addition to serving as a conduit for the flow of ideas about survey methods, scholarly networks may also act to limit opportunities for survey direction to those who are in positions to leverage certain personal connections. While our essay focuses on gender, it is likely that these networks also foster disparities based on race, nationality, socioeconomic class, and university affiliation, though it would be necessary to conduct a more in-depth demographic study of survey directors to verify this.Is this gender disparity among directors of archaeological projects limited to Loy’s sample or to survey archaeology in Greece, or is it a broader trend across Greek archaeology in general? To explore this question, we examined the 51 excavations and surveys that were granted permits by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA) between 1980 and 2020 (Fig. 2).3 Out of these 51 projects, only three excavations and six surveys (17.6%) had all-female directorship, while 17 excavations and 12 surveys (59%) had all-male directorship. A chi-square test found no significant difference in director gender balance between Loy’s sample, the ASCSA surveys since 1980, and the ASCSA excavations since 1980: X2 (2, N = 134) = 1.12, p = 0.57. This suggests that low representation of women in archaeological directorships is not more pronounced in Loy’s sample than it is across American projects in Greece over the last 40 years, nor is representation of women among directors significantly lower on ASCSA surveys than it is on ASCSA excavations in Greece. We can compare these figures to the statistics calculated by Lucia Nixon, one of the handful of female survey directors recorded in Loy’s networks, for projects with ASCSA permits between 1900 and 1980. She found that only 7 out of 49 ASCSA projects from this time period (14%) and 28 out of 294 total field seasons (9.5%) had a female director (Nixon 1994: 14–17). While the situation has improved greatly since 1980 (from only 14% of projects having any female directors to 41% having at least one female director), imbalances remain.In order to more precisely assess change over time, we collated data for archaeological surveys conducted in Greece under the auspices of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, the British School at Athens (BSA), and the Canadian Institute in Greece (CIG) from 1980 to 2020 (Table 1).4 We then tracked the gender of survey directors across these four decades (Fig. 3). Our analysis demonstrates that only in the last decade has there been a substantial increase in the percentage of female survey directors (39% for the 2010s versus 15% in the 2000s). Out of 39 surveys conducted since 1980, only 5% had all-female directorship, while 56% had all-male directorship. Even more striking is the ratio of projects led by all-female and all-male directors over the last forty years (Fig. 4). Although the percentage of projects with all-female directors has increased from 12% in the 1980s to 22% in the 2010s, the number of projects with all-male directors has remained relatively unchanged, rising from 50% of surveys in the 1980s to a peak of 75% of surveys in the 2000s and returning to 56% in the 2010s. These results indicate that although overall representation of women among survey directors has increased, the majority of Anglo-American survey projects in Greece continue to operate without any female representation at the highest level of leadership.In summary, data from the last forty years suggests that women are underrepresented among directorships of American, British, and Canadian surveys in Greece. Our study of ASCSA excavations since 1980 does not give us cause to believe that survey is less equitable than excavation in this respect. However, since survey permits in Greece used to be easier to obtain than excavation permits for foreign junior scholars, one might expect that women would be better represented in survey directorships than they currently are. For a time, even graduate students were able to obtain a permit to conduct surveys in Greece for their dissertation projects: Jenny Moody’s Akrotiri Survey and Donald Haggis’s Kavousi Survey are two examples. The Greek law that limits foreign schools to three archaeological permits a year was extended to include surveys as well as excavations in 1988 (Cherry 2003: 144).The underrepresentation of women in the directorship and publication of Aegean surveys in particular may stem partly from the disciplinary history of Aegean survey and the types of research questions that early surveys were designed to answer. Aegean survey had many of its intellectual roots in the so-called “New Archaeology” or “processual” archaeology of the 1960s and 70s, especially the large surveys focused on the Basin of Mexico and the Valley of Oaxaca (see Balkansky 2006 for an overview of these macroregional projects). Many of these projects embraced a cultural-evolutionary approach to the development of social complexity, with special interest in the process of state formation. Survey was seen as providing essential empirical data for these research goals, such that the number of tiers of a settlement hierarchy detected by survey was read as corresponding directly with the evolutionary stage of society at a given period: a 4-tier hierarchy was a “state,” a 3-tier society was a “chiefdom,” and so on (Flannery 1998: 16–21). Though some of the Mesoamerican survey archaeologists working in this tradition would later critique Mediterranean survey for its “myopic” focus on small segments of the landscape surveyed at increasingly high levels of intensity (Blanton 2001), many (though not all) Aegean surveys retained an explicit focus on state formation, cultural evolution, and economic history (see, for example, the Western Mesara Survey’s explicit focus on “the rise and subsequent development of social complexity” and “the process of social evolution” within their survey region; Watrous, Hadzi-Vallianou, and Blitzer 2004: 3, 446). If these subfields are generally the domain of male archaeologists in publication, whether because of overt bias or more subtle pressures, this tendency might contribute to gender disparities in survey directorship. We explore this hypothesis further below.Gender disparity in the directorship of Anglo-American surveys in Greece may also be related in part to lower representation of women in senior positions in British, Canadian, and U.S. classics and archaeology departments. If applying for excavation or survey permits is typically done later in one’s career, or if it is easier to receive permits when applying as a full professor than as an assistant or even an associate professor, then a lack of women higher up the academic ladder in classics or archaeology departments could result in fewer female project directors. Targeted studies of Aegean archaeology faculty at academic institutions in the US, the UK, and Canada would be needed to explore this question more fully but are beyond the scope of this essay (see Overholtzer and Jabert 2021 for a first look at the demographic profile of archaeologists at Canadian universities). The attrition of women as they move through the ranks of academia, from doctoral student to full professor, is often referred to as a “leaky pipeline” problem, where obstacles to advancement are gradually compounded across an individual’s career. Similar “leaky pipelines” may operate in archaeological fieldwork in particular, inhibiting progress from undergraduate field school student to early-career staff member to project director.These leaky pipelines almost certainly stem from a variety of factors, from overt harassment to more systemic and unconscious biases. Several recent studies have demonstrated a high prevalence of sexual harassment and gender-based discrimination in archaeology and other fieldwork-based disciplines (Clancy et al. 2014; Nakhai 2017 and 2018; Voss 2021a and 2021b). The results of Nakhai’s study, which received several hundred responses and focused specifically on archaeological field projects in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Mediterranean basin, have not yet been fully published, but her preliminary analysis shows that 22% of projects had problems with physical assault or violence, while 20% had a culture that was “accepting of sexual violations” (Nakhai 2017). It would not be surprising if such behaviors or attitudes pushed at least some archaeology students out of the field before they reached a career stage where one would apply for excavation or survey permits.It is also likely that female archaeologists apply for such permits at lower rates than their male peers, which would suggest that the lack of female project directors is due not (or not only) to active or conscious discrimination on the part of review committees or permit-granting institutions but rather to an applicant pool where women are already underrepresented. Previous studies have demonstrated that women apply for NSF and other grants for archaeological fieldwork at lower rates than their male peers (Goldstein et al. 2018). Similarly, analyses of submissions to the archaeology journals American Antiquity and Historical Archaeology have shown that acceptance rates were the same for male- and female-authored papers to these journals; men simply submitted far more manuscripts than women did (Beaudry and White 1994; Rautman 2012; Bardolph 2014: 532–33).5 A dearth of women applying for permits or fieldwork grants may have less to do with direct experiences of harassment than with disproportionately high academic service loads that detract from research time (Guarino and Borden 2017), with double standards around family choices and children for men and women in academia (Mason, Wolfinger, and Goulden 2013), or with a lack of institutional support and mentorship. The largely male peer-to-peer and mentor-to-student networks that Loy traces among project directors may exacerbate this issue. Female archaeology students or early-career researchers might not receive the same mentorship, attention, and informal opportunities as men, resulting in lower confidence. Perhaps women are being steered away (even if subtly and unconsciously) from directorial roles and toward more traditionally “female-gendered” subfields such as art history or object-based studies (for the historical gendering of archaeological fieldwork as male and finds analysis or data processing as female, see Gero 1983, 1985; Wylie 1994). This “gender division of labor” often places feminine-gendered practice at the bottom of a hierarchy, thereby devaluing it (Shanks and McGuire 1996: 82).With these themes in mind, we turn now to the importance accorded to archaeological project directors in the production of scholarly networks, where directors serve as the “edges” by which the “nodes” of different projects are connected to each other. The field of Aegean survey has historically valorized field methodology, an aspect of project design over which directors have a high degree of control, and has therefore centered project directors within networks of knowledge production. However, beginning with the University of Minnesota Messenia Expedition (often considered a major “ancestor” of intensive regional survey projects in the Mediterranean), many Anglo-American survey projects in the Aegean have employed large teams and a variety of specialists, including geomorphologists, ethnographers, specialists in historical documents, lithic specialists, and ceramicists. This group of co-researchers is jointly responsible for the study, interpretation, and publication of survey finds. As such, these projects can be more accurately characterized as collaborative efforts rather than the intellectual offspring of a single director. We were curious if the gender imbalance observed in the directorship of Anglo-American survey projects in the Aegean was also reflected in the authorship of final publications.In order to address this issue, we collected information from the final publications (where they exist) for Anglo-American surveys in the Aegean published in the last 50 years.6 For our purposes, “final publication” could entail either a monograph, a series of monographs, or a series of longform articles in a periodical (such as the publication of the Pylos Regional Archaeological Project in Hesperia). For each of the nineteen publications, we counted the number of contributors of different genders, and we also noted the genders and positions (director or staff) of the authors of methodology chapters, lithics chapters, and ceramics chapters. We suspected (1) that women would be better represented among contributors to final publications than they were among survey directors and (2) that methodology chapters, which often address broader research questions and sampling issues, would be more likely to have male authors, while finds chapters would be more likely to have female authors. This analysis thus represents a first step toward exploring the possible correlation between gender and subfield discussed above.We observe several trends in these publications (Figs. 5 and 6). First, even though women are better represented in authorship of survey publications than they are in survey director positions, they still comprise only 34% of authors (compared to 21% of directors) across the 18 projects represented. This gender disparity is most pronounced in the chapters or sections of publications that describe survey methods. Women make up only 11% of authors of these chapters or sections across all final publications. While some male staff co-author methodology sections with directors, no female staff do so; only three female directors contributed to methods sections, and two out of these three had a male co-author. Finally, the gender disparity is least pronounced in chapters on certain artifact types. Women make up 42% of authors on chapters that publish ceramics and 38% of authors on chapters that publish lithics. Authorship of these three topics in these survey publications (survey methods, survey ceramics, and survey lithics) is significantly correlated with gender (X2 (2, N = 119) = 11.19, p = 0.003). This demonstrates that, although women may be underrepresented among directors of Aegean surveys and in the publication of survey methods, they are providing valuable intellectual contributions in the analysis of survey finds.These results also demonstrate the critical role played by project staff, beyond project directors, in the interpretation of survey data and the dissemination of survey results. Our own experience as staff members on a pedestrian survey, first as “team leaders” in the field and now as part of publication teams, has made it very clear to us that the day-to-day workflow and the interpretive process of a survey project are not unilaterally controlled by survey directors. Surveys require a high level of trust and communication between director(s) and staff. Unlike most excavations, where multiple trenches are concentrated at a single site and a director can walk around fairly easily to observe proceedings, survey teams often work far apart from one another in different corners of the landscape. It is therefore much harder for a survey director to closely monitor all staff members’ operations in the field. The vast quantity and variety of surface material collected by diachronic surveys requires a large team with many different skills. Because survey directors are rarely specialists in the material culture of all represented periods, individual staff members’ interpretations hold significant weight in shaping the long-term regional narratives that such surveys produce. Excavations that last for decades, by contrast, may create a system that is managed closely by a director and where the interpretations of data at every stage are driven by years of research and experience at the site. When evaluating the intellectual networks of survey, then, it is critical to take a less “top-down,” hierarchical approach. Rather than considering only the relationships and flows of ideas between (predominantly male) directors, we should acknowledge that the interpretation and publication of survey data often integrates the contributions of a large and decentralized group of scholars, many of whom may influence each other’s ideas through more “heterarchical” and less formal channels.As staff members on the Western Argolid Regional Project (WARP), we can attest that our project had many rituals that allowed for sustained discussion throughout the field season. Weekly meetings provided an opportunity for staff to report their findings to the directors, but they also sparked collaborative discussions about survey methods and interpretation—the equivalent of the “trench-side chats” that can foster egalitarian exchange of ideas on excavations (Eddisford and Morgan 2019). On WARP, we discussed ways for field teams to navigate challenging terrain and alternative collection strategies for particularly artifact-rich or inaccessible areas. In addition to these more formal meetings, graduate student staff habitually touched base with each other in the evenings during the week to discuss logistics for the next day’s work. It is true that many of the basic methodological parameters (walker spacing, collection strategy, visibility recording, etc.) were set in advance by the directors of WARP. Yet the contributions of staff, all of whom brought a wide array of prior archaeological experiences to WARP, shaped the way that these methods were put into practice in the field and the documentation systems we used. In fact, both WARP’s field form for documenting survey units and the project’s field manual changed between the inaugural 2014 season and subsequent seasons as a result of staff input. We suspect that this type of collaborative, organic development of field methods occurs across many projects, whether or not it is formally recognized.In conclusion, we suggest that the pronounced gender disparities in the directorship of Aegean surveys are a surface manifestation of some troubling trends in archaeology and academia at large. In particular, we are concerned that the scholarly networks traced by Loy and others are not unambiguously positive but may also work to exclude certain voices and elevate others. This may have the effect of dampening new or heterodox ideas about survey, hindering the intellectual growth of the field. Finally, focusing on survey methods as the main site of intellectual exchange between different projects valorizes fieldwork and de-emphasizes the work of finds processing, interpretation, and publication—all of which are crucial steps in answering an archaeological survey project’s research questions. We recognize that our focus in this article is restricted to British, Canadian, and American projects in Greece, and we hope that this conversation can continue and incorporate more perspectives from citizens and permanent residents of many Mediterranean countries. We would like to see a field where healthy and respectful debate around archaeological methods and interpretation are encouraged, both between researchers working on different projects and between directors and staff on the same project. To achieve this goal, it is not enough merely to increase the number of women in directorships. Rather, it will require a rethinking of the hierarchical structure of archaeological projects and a commitment to an ethos of collaboration.