Production Of Archaeological Knowledge Research Articles

Decolonising the archaeology of indigenous artisanal gold mining in Eastern Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT In this paper, I will look at how I utilised archaeological ethnography as a methodology to study ancient and contemporary indigenous gold mining practices in Eastern Zimbabwe. Subsequently, I will present an archaeological field research that I undertook at Nyahokwe and Saungweme sites between 2016 and 2017 and move on to show how material culture recovered was collaboratively interpreted in conversations with contemporary indigenous gold miners. I argue that by using archaeological ethnography as a field methodology that privileges multivocality, this ultimately decolonised archaeology's underlying politics which is protected by expert hegemonic discourses. During the field study at Nyahokwe and Saungweme sites artisanal miners popularly known as makorokozas revealed their localised understanding of crucibles and hammerstones that were recovered during both archaeological excavations and surface collections. Thus, used as decolonised methodology, archaeological ethnography allowed for multiple voices to be embraced in archaeological knowledge production.

Local Worker and Excavation Director Relationships in Anatolia in the Mid-Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries

In many areas of the world, archaeological research relies on workers without formal training in archaeology or apparent direct input into archaeological knowledge production. While these workers may appear to have little agency within the excavation process, and no direct participation in research outcomes, their role is more complex. Examples of local and international archaeological teams working in Türkiye in the mid-twentieth century and today are used here to explore the articulation of worker roles in field archaeology, as portrayed in field reports. The author assesses the language associated with team members in acknowledgements of their presence and status and examines how relationships are developed and maintained. Awareness of knowledge accumulation among local archaeological workers was articulated in the 1960s and proved advantageous to both workers and directors. Recent reports show little acknowledgement of worker presence, showing that multivocality has had no significant impact in this area of archaeological knowledge production.

Archaeology for the courtroom: the Ayodhya Case and the fashioning of a hybrid episteme

On 1 August 2002, the Allahabad High Court in India, adjudicating the Ayodhya Case, ordered archaeological excavations by the central government agency Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) at the site of the demolished mosque Babri Masjid in Uttar Pradesh. The order marked a new moment for the convergence of law and archaeology in India, with archaeological knowledge being produced on judicial demand as evidence in a civil dispute. This paper argues that this marked the emergence of a hybrid episteme of archaeology-as-legal-evidence which redefines archaeology within the framework of law. It traces these tendencies by a close reading of three documents: the judgements of the Allahabad High Court and the Supreme Court in the Ayodhya Case and an order issued by a lower court in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh on 8 April 2021 in the GyanVapi Case. I argue that the new role that archaeology is assuming in courtrooms in India is destabilising the standing of the ASI as the authority of archaeological knowledge and the protector of the nation’s material past. It has also produced a category of assertive public that successfully demands production of archaeological knowledge towards ideological ends.

Introduction

Violent encounters move quickly. They explode and then weave their tentacles, as Veena Das (2007, 1) once put it, into the recesses of everyday life, amplifying the slower-paced systemic violences that already structure life in inequitable societies. Distinct acts of violence build over time. They become compound events that can eventually characterize major experiential aspects of entire generations. This compound, multidimensional violence characterizes the discipline of archaeology, just as it also exists within broader society. Because violence operates at so many different scales, pulses, and distributions, it can be difficult to identify it and parse its causes and consequences. What we choose to name as violence depends on who is doing the naming and what is socio-politically possible to name from the moment in which we are situated. Thus, while we deal with explicit, physical forms of violence, we also attend to the structural and epistemic violences that manifest themselves through the discipline's entanglements with imperialism and claims of epistemic superiority, as well as the ramifications of its entrenched whiteness. We ask: How might anthropologists reckon with the social and material realities of violent pasts and their enduring presence? What can archaeologists, specifically, contribute to this reckoning process? So much has transpired since January 2020, when many of the authors featured in this special section came together to present the early seeds of these articles. Our session, titled “Reckoning with Violence,” was held at the annual conference of the Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA), where, despite being the last programmed session, we found ourselves standing before a packed room. We realized then that we weren't the only ones longing for more-substantial ways of grappling with violence in and through archaeology. Although we thought the session timely, we certainly did not predict 2020 would bring into such stark relief the myriad forms of violence our discipline and the media had long posed as at best related but distinct, or at worst entirely disparate. The co-occurrence of the COVID-19 pandemic and a string of highly visible killings of Black people at the hands of the police and vigilantes in the United States highlighted the need to address entrenched racism and deep-seated economic inequalities here and across the globe. At the same time, there was a startling spike in anti-Asian violence, as people began to place undue blame for the pandemic on China (Coloma et al., 2021). As the pandemic wreaked havoc on the world, people seemed suddenly to have sufficient time to notice the disturbing state of racialized violence specifically (d'Alpoim Guedes, Gonzalez, and Rivera-Collazo, 2021; Buchanan, Bui, and Patel, 2020). And they reacted furiously. As the world watched, protestors toppled and transformed long-protected racist and colonialist public monuments (Fryer et al., 2021). They demanded changes to buildings and foundations named for known slavers, racists, and abusers. They called for reparations. These global uprisings were, as Jeannette Plummer Sires (2021, 957) put it, “born out of the deepest grief, rage, and desolation.” The media gave these “twin pandemics”—COVID-19 and unbridled racism—unprecedented coverage, often echoing activists’ calls for “racial reckoning” (see Franklin et al., 2020, 756–58; Thiaw, 2020). Our heritage institutions, professional societies, and academic departments were not impervious to the tumult of 2020. Many have since started to process what calls for racial reckoning might really mean for them. Granted, a marginal group within the discipline has been taking the field to task for decades about the need for such a reckoning (e.g., Colwell, 2007; LaRoche and Blakey, 1997). But the confluence of these “twin pandemics” seems to have made a great deal more people receptive to genuine self-reflection and substantive change for the first time. For instance, the editors of the journals and publications of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) released a statement in July 2020 publicly acknowledging representational shortcomings of the SAA's publications and noting that they “must actively take on the commitment to anti-racist and anti-colonialist structural change as individuals and as an organization” (Gamble et al., 2020). Such statements are welcome and have the potential to open the space for reckoning. But it seems a tall order to go from an organization whose membership dedicates almost no time to discussions of race and racism (Park, Wang, and Marwick, 2022; see also Curtoni and Politis, 2006; Gosden, 2006) to one prepared to raise the mantle of antiracism. We must be careful that the kinds of solutions proposed for enacting change don't simply traffic in “gestures of inclusion and parenthetical citation over the reorganization of anthropological practice” while the harm continues (Jobson, 2020, 267). If gestures are all we gain, then it's not so difficult to understand why some might be in favor of letting archaeology burn (sensu Jobson, 2020). Still, we have been offered a rare opportunity for reinvention (Dedrick, McAnany, and Batún Alpuche, this section). As reckoning remains a topic of frequent reference, we seek to situate what it means for the field of archaeology. Opting to reckon with historical and persistent violence in archaeology is not easy. It takes enormous emotional and intellectual energy. And because the problem is too often cast as one for individuals to solve (rather than institutions), the time required can seem especially daunting. Likewise, many who desire to pursue this kind of work harbor fears of alienating colleagues in the journey to root out problematic practices and name what often goes unsaid. Each of these concerns can conflict with the demands of academia and industry alike. Yet, for reinvention to occur, we must organize to creatively grapple with the implications and intentions of our collective work (e.g., Black Trowel Collective, 2016; Carlson, 2017; Franklin et al., 2020; Fryer, this section; Saitta, 2007; Society of Black Archaeologists, 2020). Reckoning does not promise resolution. Rather, it begins the process of exposing damages and coming to terms with wrongs. How we choose to do so today may be considered misguided or unsatisfactory in a generation or two. Nonetheless, reckoning is a necessary first step to opening up possibilities for justice, repair, and well-being. We've crafted this special section with the fervent conviction that archaeologists and heritage practitioners, whether academically situated or in professional industries, could be doing a lot more to support efforts at reckoning with violence as both an operative force in the past/present and in the epistemological orientations of our disciplines writ large. In this introduction, we speak at length about archaeology's shortcomings not to condemn it but rather to suggest avenues toward repair. However, we do not advocate repairing archaeology for archaeology's sake. Enough ink has been spilled over why archaeology matters or what makes archaeology relevant (see Stahl, 2020)—at times to a point of violent defensiveness (see, for example, Heath-Stout, 2019, 217–19). Our concern, though, is how archaeology and related heritage practices can be put to work effectively supporting things that matter beyond the small circles of our disciplines. We don't believe we can wholeheartedly contribute to societal reckoning projects (as many of the contributors herein do) without also grappling with the forms of violence endemic to our profession. We humbly acknowledge, however, that the questions we ask herein (and solutions we propose) come on the coattails of several decades of scholarship consistently aimed at figuring out the socio-political role of archaeology (e.g., Gero, Lacey, and Blakey, 1983) and how it might contribute to alleviating broader societal ailments, such as inequality, racism, and injustice (e.g., Atalay et al., 2014; Barton, 2021; Battle-Baptiste, 2011;; Douglass et al., 2019; Habu, Fawcett, and Matsunaga, 2008; Hamilakis and Duke, 2007; Kiddey, 2017, 2020; Little and Shackel, 2007; Lupu, 2020; Matthews, 2020a; McGuire, 2008; Smith et al., 2019; Stottman, 2010; Supernant et al., 2020; Voss et al., 2013; Watkins, 2020; Wilkie and Bartoy, 2000). Still, if anything has become clear these last few years, it's that a lot remains to be done. Of late, Indigenous, African diasporic, and community-centric approaches in archaeology have led the charge in attempts to right the abuses archaeologically oriented heritage practices have long perpetuated (see, for example Smith, 2006). The growing number of projects taking these approaches as their central ethos (Colwell, 2016; Wylie, 2014, 2019) is causing what might be the most significant paradigm shift in the field since the postprocessual movement (e.g., Acabado and Martin, 2020; Cipolla and Quinn, 2016; Cowie, Teeman, and LeBlanc, 2019; Diserens Morgan and Leventhal, 2020; Flewellen et al., 2022; Fryer and Raczek, 2020; Gonzalez, 2016; Lyons, 2013; McAnany and Rowe, 2015; Schmidt and Pikirayi, 2016; Sesma, 2022; Surface-Evans and Jones, 2020). There's ample overlap between those projects utilizing community collaborative methodologies and those projects whose aims center on repairing injustices and combating the epistemic violence permeating our field—a result often of our tendencies to prioritize archaeological understandings of the past while excluding other voices and perspectives (Gnecco, 2009; Schneider and Hayes, 2020). Alicia Odewale and Parker Van Valkenburgh are fashioning an exceptionally promising example of the sort of work that upends those tendencies with their Mapping Historical Trauma in Tulsa, 1921–2021 project—a community-centric exploration of the afterlife of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, which explores archaeology's potential as a tool for restorative justice (Odewale, forthcoming). Scholars working in heritage contexts steeped in violence also seem to be challenging the discipline writ large to take stock of its affective dimensions (e.g., Bondura, 2020; Lydon, 2019; Rizvi, 2019) and recommit to reflexivity in research design and implementation (Fryer, 2020). That reflexivity reveals, among other things, archaeology's deeply relational practices. It can elicit a wide range of emotions from practitioners, community partners, and interested publics. Unfortunately, we've often denied those emotions their due space, relegating them to whisper networks and late-career memoirs. Collections such as Archaeologies of the Heart (Supernant et al., 2020) demonstrate how allowing space for emotional entanglements with and ethical reflections on the research process and its results can strengthen archaeology and begin to repair the disconnect between the discipline and the communities it is poised to serve. It's exceedingly important that we disrupt our tendencies to produce detached and unfeeling accounts of violence (Byrne, 2009)—a narrative disposition that impedes our capacity to reckon by denying us a human response to the forms of violence we encounter (whether in the material record, the ways research is conducted, or the ways it is presented to and received by our audiences). What might be considered the most visible seeds of a reckoning ethos in archaeology are the hard-won changes to how archaeologists view and handle ancestral remains, as well as the ways spaces such as cemeteries are approached. There is abundant literature now on the fight for, consequences of, and remaining challenges to the repatriation legislation in the United States that would become the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA; Daehnke and Lonetree, 2011; Fine-Dare, 2002; Kakaliouras, 2017; Marek-Martinez, 2008; Mihesuah, 2000; Thomas, 2002). As it happens, 2020 marked the 30th anniversary of NAGPRA's passing. “It was a law that directly confronted the colonial histories of museums and the ethical blinders of archaeology” (Nash and Colwell, 2020, 226) without being “retributive (punishing museums for past actions) or distributive (redistributing cultural objects in an equitable way) . . . rather [it] was geared towards a kind of restorative justice in which the history of disrespect would be replaced by respectful repatriations” (Colwell, 2019, 92). As the only law of its kind, NAGPRA has also had global influence, helping to chart new directions for Indigenous-settler relations (Fforde, McKeown, and Keeler, 2020; Meloche, Spake, and Nichols, 2020) and for other groups whose graves have long been the subject of anthropological study. On the other hand, NAGPRA caused (and continues to cause) some archaeologists and physical anthropologists to double down on their commitments to “the science,” defending their unfettered access to human/ancestral remains (see discussion in Nash and Colwell, 2020). Others claim the underlying implications of the legislation have no real bearing on their particular brand of anthropology, even as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples demonstrates otherwise (see Claw et al., 2017; Hudson et al., 2020). While some archaeologists have conversely been among the key advocates for the protection of cemeteries, encouraging the conservation of burial markers and the upkeep of grounds, there has been a clear imbalance in the kinds of cemeteries positioned as priorities for preservation (Beisaw et al., 2021; Nichols, 2020; Seidemann and Halling, 2019). Implementing this legislation has been challenging, and the journey to repatriation for Indigenous peoples in the United States is far from complete (Atalay, 2018; Bondura, 2020; Colwell, 2017). Moreover, it is becoming increasingly clear that other racialized communities have suffered similar postmortem violence as Indigenous peoples in the United States and elsewhere (Atalay et al., 2020; Balanzátegui Moreno, 2018; de la Cova, 2019; De León, 2015; Dunnavant, Justinvil, and Colwell, 2021; Gust, Glover, and Houck, 2007; Lans, 2020; Lemke, 2020; Pierson, 2006; Watkins, 2022). Justice via repatriation necessitates immense amounts of time and emotional energy. Sonya Atalay (2018, 544) put it well: “Bearing witness in repatriation requires carrying many . . . moments of quiet violence.” Sometimes the buildup around that violence can't be contained. Bursting into the public eye, it forces us to reflect on what has been permissible as a result of our entrenched practices and epistemological commitments. For instance, 2021 surfaced tense politics surrounding the continued display of the Samuel Morton cranial collection at the Penn Museum, which, it was recently revealed to the public, includes the grave-robbed skulls of Black Philadelphians (Keheller, 2021). At the same time, it came to light that the partial skeletal remains of two children killed in the police bombing of the MOVE organization compound in Philadelphia in May 1985 were still in the possession of two anthropology faculty members who had been asked to aid the coroner's office in identifying them. Though their investigations were ultimately inconclusive, it's likely the remains belonged to Katricia (Tree) and Delicia Africa. Rather than returning the bones in a timely manner so they could be laid to rest with their kin, the professors kept them stored in the Penn Museum and then in a personal collection, unbeknownst to the families of the bombing's victims. In the decades that followed, those professors apparently used the bones as case studies in their classes, without regard for the ethical implications. One of those classes, Real Bones: Adventures in Forensic Anthropology, was held on the online platform Coursera and reached thousands of people (Muhammad, 2022; Thomas, 2021). The blatant misuse and mistreatment of human remains in anthropology and archaeology is not simply a thing of our colonial past. Whatever temporal distance we may have told ourselves exists between our practices today and those of our past collapses when we witness the violence—like the illicit holding of bombed body parts of two Black girls in a world-renowned public institution—that our discipline continues to make possible. Our collection practices are one of the areas complicating reckoning with violence. As Susan Pollock (this section) discusses, because collecting has an “extended temporality,” collections are often poised to accumulate violence. “Collecting and collections—and the knowledge built upon them,” she tells us, “have been historically situated at the nerve center of archaeology.” The acquisition, classification, and storage of research collections results from both the aims of individual researchers and the permissions (or nonimpediments) they receive from their institutions. Pollock describes the afterlife of a collection of human bones and casts made and later haphazardly discarded by members of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology (KWIA), a eugenicist research institution with deep ties to the Nazi regime in Germany. It's not just the disreputable association of this collection with Nazi Germany that should prompt a reckoning. It's the fact that the institute's acquisition practices resemble an all-too-familiar practice of scientific opportunism that comes at the expense of already disenfranchised people—both in life and in death. Instead, Pollock notes, the “KWIA profited from a general climate as well as specific government-driven policies of racism, abuse, and genocide.” Moreover, it's not only violence against humans but the violence against myriad animals that many of these collections (whether rediscovered in trash pits below the ground's surface or in the bowels of a museum) are imbricated. Pollock highlights the importance of considering the accumulated forms of violence involved not only in acquisition but in the deaccession and circulation of collections containing human remains: “can they no longer be needed in the same way that archival documents or collections of objects may be judged to be superfluous?” There are compelling ethical, moral, and political reasons suggesting the answer ought to be “no.” Decisions about stewardship of sensitive collections made unilaterally by museum specialists, as by archaeologists, can become antithetical to the goals of communities seeking avenues of repair by engaging the materialities of past violence (see Lau-Ozawa, this section). In this case, and in those presented by Montgomery (this section) and Fryer (this section), collaborative processes of caring for collections can open the space for healing. On the other hand, displaced and violence-ridden belongings, ancestors, and landscapes can continually harm communities, all too often without recourse (Pollock, this section; Reilly, Banton, and Stevens, this section). Will we continue to participate in these wrongdoings? What does reckoning mean for archaeologists and other heritage professionals? Several scholars have now illuminated the historical relationship between archaeology, imperialism, and colonialism (e.g., Hall, 2000; Lydon and Rizvi, 2010; McNiven and Russell, 2005; Meskell, 1998; Silliman, 2020; Trigger, 1984). Archaeology remains embedded in imperialist endeavors through its extensive use of technology developed as part of the “military-industrial-academic complex” for espionage and war (Meskell, 2020, 2022; Pollock, 2016), through its continued exploitative labor practices (Mickel, 2021), through its enabling of colonialist development projects (Hutchings and La Salle, 2015), and through archaeologists’ continued feelings of entitlement to undertake field research wherever they please in the name of stewardship (historically, see Langford, 1983). These imperialist archaeologies, whether explicit or implicit, are now widely recognized as a primary context within which archaeology has been operationalized violently, directly or indirectly (Díaz-Andreu, 2018; González-Ruibal, 2018; Meskell, 2020). In her recent treatise against imperialism, Ariella Azoulay (2019, 148) contends, “imperial violence is our commons.” In its institutionalized forms, she writes, violence “has become omnipresent, the ultimate resource held in common.” “Unlike land, water, or air,” though, “violence should not be preserved or taken care of, but rather acknowledged as that which is truly in common and also everybody's problem, to be curbed, allayed, and reversed.” The antiracist, anticolonialist uprisings of the last few years were a collective recognition of that commons. While acknowledging our imperialist roots and tendencies is key, reckoning with violence in archaeology also means explicitly facing the fact that archaeology—wittingly or unwittingly—participates in the social violence that is the maintenance of whiteness as capital and white supremacy as power (see Beliso-De Jesús and Pierre, 2020). Recent studies show that in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom (major centers of archaeological scholarly activity), the production of archaeological knowledge remains an overwhelmingly white, cis-gender endeavor (Heath-Stout, 2020, 417–20; Overholtzer and Jalbert, 2021; White and Draycott, 2020). This means the majority of the stories told by archaeologists about human history are told from the perspective of white people. Taking stock of this reality, Matthew Reilly (2022), who also contributed to this special section, flips Maria Franklin's (2001) influential provocation, “Why are there so few Black archaeologists?” to ask: Why are there so many white ones? Reilly argues that in order to contend with issues like imbalances of power, legitimacy, voice, and knowledge production in the discipline, these majority white archaeologists need to be asking more reflexive questions about what their whiteness as practitioners means for the field (see also Carlson, 2017; McDavid, 2007). Taking his cue from Meg Gorsline (2015), who argues for increased accountability measures in archaeology, Reilly (2022, 6) suggests that confronting whiteness and white privilege in our field “challenges us to rethink the archaeological principles and practitioners that we hold dear, encouraging all archaeologists, but especially those in training, to perhaps depart from our traditional methods in favour of more emancipatory frameworks.” Ayana Flewellen et al. (2021) and Elizabeth Carlson (2017) provide additional suggestions for detailed measures that might be taken to establish intentionally antiracist and anticolonial research praxes as a step to holding our institutions—and the discipline writ large—accountable (see also Smith, 2012). If anthropology is a project centered on defining the normative limits of humanity (Welcome and Thomas, 2021), then archaeologists within anthropology, in concert with physical anthropologists, have disproportionately influenced how the field understands the corporeality of the human body and its skeletal remains and genetic materials (Blakey, 2020; Colwell, 2017). Put otherwise, we've contributed to synonymizing normative humanity with white(male)ness (Conkey, 1991; Gero and Conkey, 1991; Wynter, 2003) while simultaneously exploiting the bodies of nonwhite persons for our scientific gains. It's no surprise, then, that archaeology has been produced and maintained as a white space (Poser, 2021; White and Draycott, 2020). For example, Lee Panich (2022) shows that over a century of archaeological work at the Mission Santa Clara de Asís has been used to erase the lives and experiences of thousands of Indigenous Californians while contributing to a “fantasy heritage” that embeds and naturalizes whiteness in the landscape. Archaeologists continue to struggle with . . . exactly what the field's obligation should be to people marginalized by racism and economic exploitation. [This is magnified by] the artificial division between prehistory and history which can muddy the ability of archaeologists studying the distant past to understand how the results of their research can be used in the present or have sociopolitical implications for the daily lives of the contemporary communities who may have ancestral ties to the past peoples they study. This is further exacerbated by disciplinary or theoretical commitments to objectivity, empiricism or processualism, which make some scholars either hostile to or uncomprehending of the ways in which interpretations or artefacts of the past can be used to marginalize non-white and poor people. (22) We raise the issue of whiteness precisely because we think that archaeology (and its related fields) can be mobilized toward decolonial (Atalay, 2006; Nelson, 2021) and antiracist (Flewellen et al., 2021; Fong et al., 2022; González-Tennant, forthcoming) ends. Calls for decolonizing the field have steadily increased since the 1990s, and decolonization remains a looming, unfinished project. As Akhil Gupta argued in his 2021 presidential address to the American Anthropological Association, anthropologists and anthropology do not function simply as handmaidens to colonialism, but when we do not acknowledge that race and location matter to the work that we do and that our very presence in a community can be a reminder (or an enactment) of colonialism, we stifle what anthropology could be (Gupta and Stoolman, 2021, 16–17; see also Fryer, 2020). A shared esteem for the archaeological record will never be enough to chart a productive way forward when whiteness continues to create barriers to effective research (see Hart, 2020). And, as Chardé Reid (2022) demonstrates, even when we have worked to reverse the effects of racist archaeological research, public perception of the places we have come to steward may take generations to shift. A real break with past models will require that we first be diligent about the unacknowledged ways that violence permeates the discipline. Maia Dedrick, Patricia McAnany, and Iván Batún Alpuche (this section) demonstrate this very problem when they interrogate the works of Sylvanus Morley, the renowned Mayanist who, while laying the foundations of what would become one of the most influential subdisciplines of archaeology, was also organizing espionage networks and reinforcing colonialist agendas. Although his questionable actions certainly warrant some reckoning in their own right, Dedrick, McAnany, and Batún Alpuche show that it's the implicit biases of his archaeological analyses and interpretations that have made a truly lasting impression on the field. Morley drew from Spanish colonial accounts as well as the statistics and calculations of physical anthropologist Morris Steggerda to make faulty claims about agricultural labor in Yucatan. His apologist stance toward colonialism and imperialism aided in alienating Indigenous Maya communities from their lands and labor, perpetuated the view of Maya farmers as lazy and agentless, and misguided archaeological and anthropological studies of Colonial-period and earlier Maya foodways for decades. Yet, his research is still considered a vital entry point to the field. These colonialist agendas do not exist solely in the abstract: they work to produce or uphold real food insecurities, exploitation, displacement, and denigrating representations. Amanda Logan (2016) discusses a similar phenomenon in a provocative article—“Why Can't People Feed Themselves?”—in which she shows how food insecurities in Ghana are a direct result of colonialism and that not recognizing them as such severely skews our interpretation of the archaeological record concerning foodways and climate. Archaeologists have engaged in forms of epistemic violence by skewing “evidence” toward the validation of already-distorted interpretations reliant on categories that are themselves derived from colonial pursuits (see also Fricker, 2011; Haber, 2015; Hartemann, 2021; Jofré Luna, 2015; Panich and Schneider, 2019). The intentionality of these moves to skew only matters so much when the outcome is our continued implication in regimes of injustice and inequity. The difficulty is that much of the racism accompanying global archaeological practice is produced through ignorance (e.g., archaeologists who study Black or Indigenous pasts without ever engaging Black or Indigenous studies) or good intentions (e.g., scholars who desire to solve contemporary issues related to inequality through research that simultaneously reinscribes it). Ignorance should be easy to overcome: if we are good at anything as students, scholars, and professionals, it should be taking the necessary steps to educate ourselves. Yet racism (and its attendant violence) emerges and persists, a phenomenon Lee Baker (2021) names “racist antiracism.” Why? The late philosopher Charles Mills (2007) asserts that ignorance too is racialized. That is, white ignorance (defined not simply as a contingent nonknowing but rather as a nonknowing embedded in white racial domination and its ramifications) is insidious because it emerges through both direct racist action and socio-structural conditions that make it possible for the “non-racist cognizer [to] form mistaken beliefs (e.g., that after the abolition of slavery in the United States, blacks generally had opportunities equal to whites) because of the social suppression of the pertinent knowledge” (Mills, 2007, 21). Because of the power relations and patterns of ideological hegemony involved in societies characterized by white racial domination, Mills tells us, white ignorance may not be a phenomenon confined only to white people. Though moments like 2020 or movements like Black Lives Matter can be galvanizing, they are not equipped to usher in substantive change overnight in the face of an ignorance cultivated to exclude, deny, and oppress. That kind of change requires we reckon with our disciplinary biases while making space for nonwhite epistemologie

Knowing Palmyra: Mandatory production of archaeological knowledge

During the Syrian conflict, ongoing since 2011, Palmyra became notorious for the destruction and looting of its Roman-period remains, giving rise to many narratives of what Palmyra’s future should bring, often without attention to how we have come to know its past. This article explores that past through a key period—the French Mandate—when European archaeologists categorically reshaped the site, culminating in the relocation of the site’s population from mudbrick houses in and around the Temple of Bel to a new, military-built town north of the original. We examine the site immediately prior to that transformation through contemporary archaeological diaries from 1924 to 1928, written by Danish archaeologist Harald Ingholt. Through his diaries, it is possible to reconstruct the complexity of knowledge production at the site, which disrupts the authorized discourses of archaeological discovery with important consequences for how we understand the contribution of local inhabitants to scientific knowledge.

Writings of Borobudur: Making sense of an Early Modern Javanese manuscript within the production of archaeological knowledge in Indonesia

As a heritage site today, Borobudur is arguably constructed from stories of ancient grandeur, regrettable loss, and colonial rescue, infused with lingering aesthetics of colonial construction. This paper discusses the historical deconstruction of the process of historical knowledge production of Borobudur by analysing the Babad Tanah Jawi manuscript produced from the late 18th century to the early 19th century by Javanese courts. The result shows that during the Early Modern Java, Borobudur held significant spiritual quality for the local communities, unlike the previous interpretation by the colonial authorities.

Encounters with the Archaeological Archive

ABSTRACT The archival encounter is an often-neglected consideration in the use of archaeological archives and field records. However, this encounter can have significant impacts on the interpretation of archaeological evidence and the way that knowledge is produced. This is particularly apparent when exploring fundamental differences between the materiality of archaeological evidence in the field and in the archive and how this impacts engagement and interpretation. By drawing on practical examples, the following article considers different aspects of materiality in archaeological archives and how they influence the interpretation of archaeological data and the production of archaeological knowledge. Each excavation archive is unique and the product of a particular combination of excavation, recording, curation, research, and interpretive methods which all must be acknowledged. The below argues that the archival encounter is a material encounter which directly influences the interpretation and original creation of records.

Archaeological knowledge production: reading mortuary reconstructions

Research on archaeological knowledge production emphasises the contingent nature of understandings of the past. In practice, however, levels of uncertainty and conjecture can easily become less than obvious in interpretations, perhaps especially visual ones. The authors interrogate multiple textual and visual accounts of a Viking-Age burial to demonstrate how selection processes—what to portray or omit—highlight the contextual nature of the knowledge claims in these images. Arguing that the circulation of reconstructions shorn of textual nuance leads to misperceptions, the authors call for transparency in the creation of these images. Rather than definitive depictions of archaeological fact, these reconstructions offer tools for archaeologists and the public to think with.

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

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.

Archives in action. The impact of digital technology on archaeological recording strategies and ensuing open research archives

Digital-born research archives, data re-use, participation and the inclusion of academic and lay stakeholders in archaeological knowledge production. These are important topics that are increasingly addressed but often overlooked in the creative stages of archiving, be it data collection or the reproduction of an archiving practice. This creative practice is affected and changing due to the implementation of digital technology. These practices are reproduced in the design of the research archive and, as such, the impact of technology can potentially be scrutinised and traced reversely by analysing the uses of the archive. In addition, digital technology is believed to prompt greater inclusivity of diverse audiences. But how to reach that audience, and who is this “audience”? In this paper, emphasis is placed to reflect upon the practice of archiving of ongoing, post-excavation archaeological research with an audience, as opposed to well-established reflexive research into excavation and museum practices. As such, the concept of archiving as research process, rather than the traditional approach towards archives as data repositories is introduced here. As a case study to identify and assess potential change in a particular archaeological practice, the paper describes and analyses the archiving practice of the team of the Tracing the Potter's Wheel-project, from its inception in offices and storerooms to the archive's targeted manifold use as a place of knowledge production, data sharing and learning.

Excavating the Archive / Archiving the Excavation: Archival Processes and Contexts in Archaeology

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on the production of archaeological knowledge within the fieldwork archive. Archaeological archives do not always reflect the reality of evidence uncovered during fieldwork processes or even the fieldwork processes themselves. This includes the many different agents and agencies, which are crucial to the construction of archaeological knowledge and their representation—or lack of representation—in the archive. Archaeological archives impose restrictions on how knowledge is included in a collection, the way it is recorded, and the fieldwork processes used. Therefore, this article considers the way in which the processes of archival documentation produce, transform, and construct archaeological knowledge. The main examples are from the British School of Archaeology in Egypt's excavations at Abydos between 1921 and 1922, often referred to as the Tombs of the Courtiers and directed by Flinders Petrie. Looking at the different contexts of an excavation archive, from before its creation to its ongoing curation and use, can reveal significant aspects not just of the history of archaeology but also on many of the ongoing recording methods and processes still used in the field today.

Digital archaeological knowledge production and communication among metal detectorists: A web focus group discussion

ABSTRACT As digital tools develop and become more openly available, not only archaeologists but also other groups that have an interest in archaeological heritage and the past are taking more and more digital tools and ideas into use in their research and practices. One such group with particular interests in archaeological heritage is hobbyist metal detectorists. Although the hobby has been around in some countries since as early as the 1960s, it is also clear that digital developments – from state-sanctioned infrastructures such as the emerging national finds recording databases, to detectorist adoption of social media platforms for sharing information – are having a profound effect on hobbyists and their knowledge production practices. In this article, we present and discuss our findings from a web focus group that we carried out with metal detectorists from seven different northern and eastern European countries.

An exploratory approach to archaeological knowledge production

An exploratory approach to archaeological knowledge production

On the Emerging Supremacy of Structured Digital Data in Archaeology: A Preliminary Assessment of Information, Knowledge and Wisdom Left Behind

AbstractWhile the epistemological affordances and varied impacts of different media on archaeological knowledge production have been scrutinized by many practitioners in recent decades, sources of digital structured data (e.g., spreadsheets, traditional relational databases, content management systems) have seen far less critical enquiry. Structured digital data are often venerated for their capacities to facilitate interoperability, equitable data exchange, democratic forms of engagement with, and widespread reuse of archaeological records, yet their constraints on our knowledge formation processes are arguably profound and deserving of detailed interrogation. In this article, we discuss what we call the emerging supremacy of structured digital data in archaeology and seek to question the consequences of their ubiquity. We ground our argument in a case study of a range of texts produced by practitioners working on the Çatalhöyük Research Project. We attempt to map short excerpts from these texts to structured data via the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model. This exercise allows making preliminary observations about the representational affordances and resistances of texts (which can be considered as a type of semi- or unstructured data) and structured data. Ultimately, we argue that the push to create more and more structured and structurable data needs to be tempered by a more inclusive digital practice in archaeology that protects difference, incommensurability, and interpretative nuance.

Art, Creativity and Automation. From Charters to Shared 3D Visualization Practices

Abstract In this study, we introduce the themes of the Special Issue on Art, Creativity and Automation. Sharing 3D Visualization Practices in Archaeology, and present the most important outcomes of a roundtable session involving prominent researchers in the field, organized by the authors during the Archon Winter School in February 2020. By assessing the diversity of research aims, artistic projects, creative practices and technology used in the contributions to the Special Issue, and drawing on the thoughts and perspectives generated during the roundtable discussion, we seek to identify shared challenges within the community of visualizers which could ultimately pave the way to shared practices. In this light, we assess whether established charters and guidelines are still relevant in a now matured digital archaeology, where visualization techniques have attained a central position in archaeological knowledge production. Although parts of the guidelines have become common practice, the remainder did not keep up with the fast pace of development of digital practice and its current fundamental role in archaeology, and as a result some of the guidelines risk becoming obstructive in archaeological creative practice.

From Drawing into Digital: On the Transformation of Knowledge Production in Postexcavation Processing

AbstractDigital methods have undoubtedly become an integral part of archaeology in recent decades. This has had a major impact on how archaeological knowledge is produced. Accordingly, there has been a recent increase in the number of studies addressing this issue and calling for a reflexive approach. Although studies have so far focused on the changes in knowledge production in fieldwork practices, studies of postexcavation processes are rare. This way of archaeological knowledge production is described using the analysis of old excavation documentation of the medieval waterfront of Schleswig, northern Germany, through geographic information system. It is achieved by an approach that combines the methodological tool of achaîne opératoirewith concepts based on the actor-network theory, whereby the production of knowledge is understood as a translation network. The approach reveals the individual processing steps and how the data change. Accordingly, for each step, not only are the applied practices described in detail, but also the influence of actors, devices, and documents is mentioned. This allows not only a critical reflection of the approach and a review of the interpretation, but also demonstrates that profound archaeological findings are possible despite data alteration through digital methods.

The Technological Condition of Human Evolution: Lithic Studies as Basic Science

The recent elaboration and rapid expansion of aDNA, paleoproteomics, and related fields have propelled a profound “biomolecular turn” in archaeology and fundamentally changed the topology of archaeological knowledge production. Such a transformation of the archaeological research landscape is not without consequence for long-standing research practices in the field, such as lithic analysis. This special issue derives from the session Old Stones, New Eyes? organized by the authors at the UISPP World Congress in Paris in 2018, which aimed to explore the future of lithic studies. An underlying theme of our session was the felt need to respond to the increasing marginalization of lithic research in terms of its capacity to (1) contribute to the grand narratives of early human evolution and (2) better articulate the role and significance of lithic studies in interdisciplinary human origins research. In this editorial, we briefly outline some of the questions and challenges raised by the biomolecular turn and advocate for a more self-conscious and reflexive stance among lithic experts. We argue that lithic studies fulfill all necessary requirements to act as a basic science for human origins research and that its role and status depends less on technological advances, such as, e.g., improved computing facilities, novel analytical software, or automated shape capture technologies, than on continuous work on the conceptual and methodological foundations of inquiry. We finally draw attention to the unique capability of lithic studies to shed light on the human technological condition and illustrate this potential by introducing and briefly discussing the papers included in this issue.

Worlding Excavation Practices

Abstract This paper seeks to do justice to the often complex, messy, and sometimes ambiguous meaning making practices of archaeological field work. Taking recent adoptions of assemblage theory and sensory studies in archaeology as an angle of arrival, I contribute here to discussions on self-reflective and interpretive archaeology. Drawing on empirical encounters with troweling and backfilling at the Ardnamurchan Transitions Project in western Scotland, I describe the production of archaeological knowledge in terms of storying: the coming into existence of an earthly archaeological world through sensory correspondences. I show how storying generates meaning and knowledge through correspondences of more proximate with more distant excavation practices and interplays between them. Furthermore, I propose that through storying, archaeological meaning making as well as knowledge production can be understood as worlding: the generation of sustained remembrances of earthly events with lively corresponding materials.

The Use of Serious Games as an Educational and Dissemination Tool for Archaeological Heritage Potential and Challenges for the Future

In the last decades, digital technologies have pervaded every aspect of the production of archaeological knowledge and they have been massively used to communicate the past. This contribution analyses the potential and benefits of serious games as they appear a promising tool for engaging the users in active learning of cultural contents, for attracting new audiences and promoting knowledge and awareness around archaeological heritage. Moreover, the need for multidisciplinary collaborations between archaeologists and developers and the necessity of assessment studies on learning levels to implement their effectiveness will be highlighted.

Going from Analogue to Digital: A Study of Documentation Methods during an Excavation of the Neolithic Flint Mines at Pilbladet, Sweden

The ‘digital turn’ in archaeology has resulted in documentation, analysis, visualization and repository requirements becoming increasingly digital in recent years. However, we are only at the beginning of understanding how the shift from analogue to digital affects archaeological interpretation, as attention has mainly been directed towards technological aspects. However, how archaeology is executed influences the production of archaeological knowledge, and additional research into digital practices and their consequences is needed. During the latest excavation in 2014 of the Neolithic flint mines of Södra Sallerup, in Malmö in southern Sweden, several recording methods were used to document the remains in plan, including hand drawing, digital mapping with GPS and digital photography using a camera mounted on a pole. The records were used to create both a digital plan as well as georeferenced orthophotos from a 3D model and from photomosaic. The aim was to produce a record comparable to previous documentation from decades of archaeological excavations of the flint mines in the area, as well as one that is up-to-date with today’s digital standards. The methods are described and their consequences for the archaeological results are discussed.