Nomadic Thoughts: Foundations of Applied Anthropology: Public involvement in archaeology

Friday, March 17, 2006

Foundations of Applied Anthropology: Public involvement in archaeology

I had heard of some archaeologists using community volunteers to carry out fieldwork but I always thought that it was sort of a public service apart from getting real work done. Of course this is not the case and it’s (in my opinion) completely necessary for archaeologists to not only engage the public but invite them to get dirty and make real contributions to research results. From what I know about the field many archaeologists can be rather elitist or give the impression that their research is too important to invest time and effort in involving the general public. This is where applied archaeology comes in and why I think it’s important to constantly engage the public on several levels. Would involving non-archaeologists in actual excavations and analyses compromise the rigorousness of a study? Basically, I feel that in most situations (but not all) the benefits of inviting the public to participate in archaeology far outweigh any potential risks. I think it’s irresponsible for an archaeologist to assume that just because a person doesn’t have a degree they are going to ruin a dig or compromise results. There’s an inherent risk in bringing aboard untrained individuals to help with your work, but so is believing that your training automatically makes you a better steward of the past.

Another interesting point is raised by some anecdotal evidence. When I was in Belize two summers ago with a field school it turned out that the locals hired to help with clearing and moving dirt were actually very successful at contributing to the goals of the project. As students we were learning all about methods and types of analyses but were still very new to archaeology. Some of our helpers had been on many digs throughout Mesoamerica and although they had no formal training, they were able to locate certain artifacts more readily than most of the students (usually the very small copper prills our instructor was primarily interested in). Richard Leaky describes how some of his fossil hunting expeditions were only successful after local guides were able to spot skeletal fragments on the surface, objects that would be invisible to most people unfamiliar with the terrain. Finally, many untrained people who participate in archaeology will sometimes come up with ideas or theories that may never have crossed the mind of the trained archaeologist. We often get so caught up in our research goals that we can easily miss things that aren’t immediately relevant to what’s in our cluttered mind at that moment. Of course overcoming this obstacle is part of the archaeologist’s training and takes practice and patience, but I find it hard to believe that a single individual with a piece of sheepskin is the end-all when it comes to ensuring sound treatment of the past. Finally, I’ll end by saying that there are indeed certain situations where having untrained individuals would be detrimental or impractical to a project, especially when you are dealing with human remains or highly publicized sites.

Posted by Will at March 17, 2006 10:47 AM in Papers and Essays

Comments

Hi, I've been reading your blog for a while and this post moved me to comment. As a teacher at an alternative school for kids with discipline problems I had the opportunity to supervise my students while they assisted a professional archaeologist. The project was at a site owned by a small town historical society in Virginia and they were basically forced to use volunteer labor or not have a dig at all. It would be an understatement to say that I feared supervising the kids would be a nightmare. I did not want to be the teacher that let some kid walk off with a civil war artifact, or trample evidence of some colonial American presence. The supervising professional archaeologist, who was volunteering her time as well, absolutely enthralled my students. Somehow they went from thinking they were going to dig up a cannon, and then turn it on the school principal, to showing real excitement over tiny pieces of blue and white ceramic fragments. For the rest of the school year they would hound me to find information about digs going on all over the world. All of these students are now old enough to vote. I like to think that their experience on one dig, long ago, makes them more aware of your discipline. I hope that when a major public works project is delayed, or altered, to preserve something of archaeological importance that they will remember how important those mundane pieces of someone's crockery were the day they were the ones doing the discovering.

Posted by: Port Tampa at March 17, 2006 12:23 PM

Ah, I'd say that moved me too! Keep that "don't-know mind," as the bhuddist may say; at the reliquary. Not a bad setting off paragraph at all. Before I had read Port Tampa's comment, I was going to add a few flagged darts in that handsome Bull of Aides des Archiv d' Terre.
One wonders just how thoroughly insular archaeology and historicism is, in its attempts to bring sharp connected detail to ghastly but recognizable contrivances over survival, that people trained in remote sensing, chemistry, biology, PR and equipment rental, or who need to learn anew are neither required nor granted either citation categories sensible to research within archaeology, nor seen to do more creative work in synthesis.
There certainly is a public relations (...service isn't the word I'd use, unless you really can get more white-collar prison labor) angle to it! On the other hand there is a duty to let people know (at least if they're a persistent kid and ask twice) how deep their city goes, what they can expect to be disturbing if they build there, and how the filing processes and timing go, (see also the one-maker (except audio) movie _Pale Cocoon_; mellow watching) and perhaps to consider how public and private uses have evolved (grown violently, taken shade from one another, filed or declared separations, etc.) (/me goes off to look for civil engineering journals I've missed....)
The things I expect to happen in bringing others in are (on the bad side, of course;) derailing the project, claiming random liabilities (the earth should not have been unflat when dug in Massachusetts, m'lud!)and legal externalities requiring personal court showings, hosing or running off with the data, poltergeist sightings (and claims by the Poltergeist Faith,) and any number of things for which there -must- be some kind of ca. 2003 handbuch out on for now, perhaps in the form of a Debian distribution particular to the field. One can't be expected to file a 10 year business plan and fund it just because nobody excavated the old city hall in building the new, or declare the missive as an honest trash heap rather than a lost site, and it has to be dug for some compelling paleobiological reason city hall claims, yesterday. Is that work sketched in?

...I think I forgot something simple too, but this margin, you know.

Posted by: Svrdqut at March 20, 2006 06:32 PM