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God Save the Archaeological Record with Bill Caraher - Ep 14
727 Plays4 years ago
It's your lucky day, punk. It's time to tear down walls and explore what the meaning of Punk Archaeology is and see what its perspective has to offer archaeology as a whole. I talk to Bill Caraher, who maintains the blog, Archaeology of the Mediterranean World and was also involved in the Archaeology Un-conference that spawned the book Punk Archaeology.
We begin with his journey into archaeological through latin classes and then Classics, then after doing exams, decided to be an archaeologist. Bill has studied and worked in Greece at sites like Isthmia and led projects in Cyprus. We discuss working in different parts of the world and how archaeology can have a profound affect on local communities, especially if they feel part of the history making. Bill talks about working with temporary workers during and after the North Dakota oil boom, where resources were extracted from the Bakken formation. Hours of video, interviews and paper documentation were made in order to understand temporary living places and people's relation to place.
Perhaps archaeology should be more open and encouraging, but in what ways can it develop if the same people are at the forefront?
Bill also mentions that if anyone is interested in publishing that they should contact him or https://ndquarterly.org/
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Transcript
Introduction of Podcast and Guest
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
William Caraher's Roles and Education
00:00:32
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Modern Myth with me, Tristan, the anarchologist. Today I have the wonderful, wonderful privilege of talking to William Caraher, Bill Caraher, Caraher. Oh my word, I cannot say your surname. Thank you for coming on and apologies for portraying your surname. Thanks. Yeah, thanks for having me. I don't get to do many podcasts. This will be fun.
00:00:55
Speaker
Good, good. I definitely, this is, I know this is going to be a fun one. Cause I actually, I've read a lot of the work you've done and we'll be definitely bringing up some of that stuff because I am really, really interested to pick your brain about a couple of things. So I hope you're ready. All right. That's a little intimidating.
00:01:15
Speaker
Don't worry about it. So as I understand it, you are the publisher of the digital press at the University of North Dakota. You're also a professor there. I sometimes mess up titles. So I'll let you introduce yourself properly. I'm an associate professor in the Department of History here at UND, as we call it. And I'm also editor of the literary journal North Dakota Quarterly.
00:01:43
Speaker
So I'm not to be too suspicious of you being in the history department, am I? A little bit, yeah. I was thinking just earlier this week that I've never actually had an archaeology class. I'm completely field trained.
00:01:59
Speaker
Right. Is that kind of where you saw yourself from a very young age? Did you look at Indiana Jones and think, hey, I'm going to be an archaeologist? Or what happened there? No, I didn't think about that at all. In fact, my training, I went to Catholic schools. I grew up on the East Coast in Wilmington, Delaware, big Catholic community. Went to a big urban all boys Catholic school.
00:02:22
Speaker
and started taking Latin. In fact, I started taking Latin in elementary school because my language skills weren't good. So they threw me in a Latin class and I took a bunch of Latin. And when I got to college after I entered college, something almost sounds 19th century to say things like this, but I had six years of Latin. So I naturally decided to take Latin in college because I thought this was an easy way to get good grades out of the gate.
00:02:52
Speaker
And I went to a small liberal arts college in the South called the University of Richmond, and I found a very welcoming department with very charismatic faculty. And they kind of sucked me into the entire world of classics. I took Greek, I took Latin, I took biblical Hebrew. And when I was a junior or senior, it seemed like a natural course to go to grad school in... I knew I didn't want to do classics, but it seemed like a natural course to go to grad school in history.
00:03:20
Speaker
And I assumed that I would just be a textual historian, that I would just be the kind of garden variety. In fact, when I first got to grad school, my first effort at a dissertation topic was something dreadful like the Roman Navy in the second century BC.
00:03:36
Speaker
And yeah, my master's thesis was very textual. It was looking at Arian and courteous Rufus, Alexander historians, very much kind of conventional ancient history. And it wasn't until really after my comprehensive exams, which is not the ideal time to decide that really what you want to be is an archaeologist.
00:03:56
Speaker
But that's kind of what happened. So after my comps, I started to take archaeology or not take classes, even hang around archaeologists.
First Dig Experiences and Cultural Reflections
00:04:07
Speaker
And yeah. So what was the first was the first dig you went on then?
00:04:13
Speaker
I started, I started, my advisor is a guy called Tim Gregory and he is the director of the Ohio State Excavations at Isthmia in Greece, which is primarily a Roman bath, but it also has a big fort called the Hexamelian and has a fort associated with that, which is just an
00:04:32
Speaker
fifth, sixth century. And I went there during a study season and just sort of hung around. And then a year later, when they started a survey of the Eastern Corinthia, so Isthmus in the in the Corinthia, I went and then worked for five years on that.
00:04:50
Speaker
and then continue to play around in the Corinthia. And it's kind of funny, the first time I was actually on an excavation, was excavation I directed, which is exactly what you want to hear from your excavation director. I surrounded myself before, you know, the flags go up on my ethical, whatever, you know, ethical flags go up. I surrounded myself with extraordinary excavators. And so,
00:05:16
Speaker
And it was in Cyprus and it was in 2003 or four or five or so. No, it must be later than 2008, something like that. Anyway, whenever it was, it wasn't actually that long ago. And so I'm not really much of an excavator. I find it really boring, but I'm a survey archaeologist type person. I like to be out in the countryside and working at scale. And most of my archaeological experience has been surveys on Cyprus and in Greece.
00:05:44
Speaker
Right, right. I mean, that's probably, I mean, was there a bit of a kind of there must have been some sort of cultural or geographical difference, you know, going from, you know, America over to Greece? I mean, did you ever notice anything when you're out there that kind of sticks in your memory as the experience?
00:06:07
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, Greece is a very different place from the US. I've had the good fortune of living there, both when I wrote my dissertation, which was more architectural history, and I've been doing fieldwork. In fact, this year is the first year in over 20 years that I'm not in Greece in the summer. And so it's a little hard for me to
00:06:28
Speaker
kind of venture back to that point in my life where Greece was unfamiliar. I still feel like when we're landing in the Athens airport, a sense of almost like I'm, I mean, without sounding too melodramatic or whatever, but like a sense of going home, right?
Origins of 'Punk Archaeology'
00:06:44
Speaker
Like this is a place I know. Like I don't get nervous in the Athens airport. Like I don't get nervous in Athens because I know the routines and I'm not like by nature, like an intrepid traveler. I'm not someone who wants,
00:06:56
Speaker
Like I went to EIA's a couple years ago in Barcelona and I spent the entire time being very aware that I didn't speak Spanish well. And that was very stressful for me. But Greece, it's like a comfortable place. Cyprus is a comfortable place now. And so it's hard for me to think back sometimes to those days where it was very unfamiliar.
00:07:16
Speaker
Now one of the reasons that I know of your work is through the book punk archaeology. I just want to bring you back to, that was released back in, was it 2014?
00:07:35
Speaker
This book is a collection of various pieces by like archaeologists and actually the kind of like it's kind of a it is a mix of lots of different people and I kind of want to get a good understanding of how this book came together and what was your role in kind of like in it as well. So let's start at the start. How did the book Punk Archaeology appear?
00:08:01
Speaker
so yeah okay so this this has again takes us back to Greece um it happened that that uh when so I do my my I do a lot of different things probably most of them not very well but uh my my actual area of background is uh like fifth to tenth century eastern Mediterranean Greece stuff right primarily and so when I was but but what you do when you study
00:08:26
Speaker
ancient Greece, the archaeology of ancient Greece, particularly as a historian or classes, you go spend time at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. And during my time there, you know, there was a sense, there's a sense of being a little bit marginal, right, because it's classical studies, right, this is, you know, the study of
00:08:48
Speaker
at its most narrow, you know, whatever you'd say it is, you know, fifth to fourth century Greece, you know, maybe just Athens, actually. And in its broadest, you know, the classical period maybe goes through the Roman period. So third century AD on the one hand and maybe starts in that.
00:09:05
Speaker
6th century BC or 7th century BC or whatever. And so I was always on the kind of chronological margins. Also the methods I use, you know, I was a survey guy. So I was an archaeologist, but I was also in a history program and I wasn't a digger. I didn't dig at any of the kind of classic American sites where, you know, you cut your teeth.
00:09:24
Speaker
Athenian agora or whatever. I was like wandering around in the countryside with my advisor, this guy, Tim Gregory, who was also doing late stuff, who for various reasons had been sort of on and off persona non grata at the American school. And it's I was kind of a more, I mean, I don't want to paint myself out to be some sort of Vox Clementus or something, you know, wild haired, you know, speaking truth to power, but I certainly wasn't like part of the kind of
00:09:50
Speaker
traditional practice of archaeology at that time. So that's kind of part of the story. So me and this other guy called Costis Carellis, he's at
Concept and Challenges of Punk Archaeology
00:10:00
Speaker
the time was a grad student at Penn, and he was very similar to me in some sense. He was an architectural historian, but he was really doing field work. And he and I got to know each other and talk primarily online, actually.
00:10:12
Speaker
We organized a conference panel, I think, at maybe a archaeological institute of America on abandonment in classical period. And we edited an issue of the International or whatever it is, the International Journal of Historical Archaeology dedicated to abandonment in the Mediterranean. And in fact, we hadn't even met, but we talked a lot online about kind of our experiences of being kind of marginal figures in our fields.
00:10:39
Speaker
particularly in the study of Greece, and part of that naturally turned to, you know, talking about music and things like that, and talking about what are the institutional history that made us kind of these somewhat more marginal figures in our discipline. This is going somewhere, I promise. Don't ever ask people. Origin stories are always a little bit weird.
00:11:02
Speaker
In any event, part of this came into talking about various archaeologists who had had pretty figures who had had some experience in the music scene. Then as we started trading notes, it occurred to us that we probably had been on similar shows in Philadelphia. My buddy Costis was a Philly kid.
00:11:24
Speaker
I grew up in Wilmington, Delaware. We probably had been at similar shows. We had similar tastes in music. And we started talking about what a punk archaeology would look like, which was very comfortable for us because we're speaking from, we felt like we were speaking from the margins of discipline in some way. And this was, OK, all of this is happening. At some point, we said, we should do a conference.
00:11:45
Speaker
And as we started to talk about this more, a couple of my North Dakota friends became interested. And this guy, Andrew Reinhardt, who recently finished his PhD at York, but has been a longtime publisher for archaeological stuff. He was publisher at the American School of Classical Studies Press, which is a very good American kind of traditional press. And now I think he's, I can't remember what his title is, but he's the publisher of the American Newismatic Society Press.
Contemporary Archaeology in North Dakota
00:12:12
Speaker
Any of it he became in that somehow became involved in conversation Andrew finds his way to become involved in lots of interesting conversations and Yeah, long story short is we decided to do a conference in Fargo
00:12:26
Speaker
And we got some money from various people to put on this conference and we decided we'd have musicians there too. So we got a bunch of bands together and it was at a bar, a hotel bar at Howard Johnson's that was about at the very end of its use life. I mean, this thing, this is the end. This is like, I think the place gets torn down like two years later.
00:12:46
Speaker
And we just decide to occupy the bar. I mean, we organized it with the owners of the bar. It wasn't so weird. But we basically took over the bar for a night. But not really. Other patrons were coming in and playing pool. Then we had a megaphone. And then there were bands. And there were these talks. And a bunch of my buddies came in. It was the middle of winter, too. Man, it must have been like,
00:13:07
Speaker
We left there late at night, 1 or 2 a.m., and it was probably, I don't know, minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit. It was brutally, brutally cold. So everyone gathers in Fargo for this event. At the end of it,
00:13:23
Speaker
We said, well, we should do a book. But none of us really knew how to do a book, except Andrew, because Andrew is a publisher. And this other guy who's kind of instrumental in this moment was this guy called Joel Johnnitz. And he's a graphic designer here at the University of North Dakota. And he said, hey, I'll help you guys with graphic design. I'll do some poster design. Because he was just the type of guy who'd show up for anything that was kind of a good time.
00:13:49
Speaker
Yeah. And so he kind of showed up, showed up and gave the book its kind of graphic identity. And Andrew showed up to help us with the kind of production workflow. And then everything was sort of coming together. And this guy Joel tragically and suddenly died. And then we're like, now what? We have this book. And then we invited a bunch of other people, Colleen Morgan, a bunch of other people to contribute. And we had this manuscript.
00:14:14
Speaker
But I didn't know how to use InDesign. Andrew was really busy. We had to excavate the files, not out of wanting to work on the book, but we had helped his widow get the
00:14:28
Speaker
his professional files off his computer. And so we had found in that kind of excavation the files for it. And it took us about a year or two after that. It took me a year after that to learn enough in design to get back into producing it and also kind of get over the kind of, you know, this guy was a close buddy of mine. He was down the street. Yeah, of course. And get over the kind of emotional impact of that. And so finally we decided, okay, this book's going to come out.
00:14:52
Speaker
And yeah, and that's the kind of story behind it. And then once you publish one book, it suddenly seems like a good idea to serve as the publisher for more books, which I'm sure is still out on whether that is in fact a good idea, but that's it.
00:15:09
Speaker
That's so amazing. I absolutely love it. And I think it exemplifies the
Accessibility and Democratization of Archaeology
00:15:14
Speaker
attitude of punk archaeology. Although I think we haven't really been, you haven't been too specific about what punk archaeology is. I'm guessing that's for good reason is that punk archaeology is what you make of it, I guess, just like any archaeology.
00:15:32
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's fair. I think when I first started talking about this with Costis, there were two trajectories. One is Costis was very interested in the archaeology of punk movement in general, right? So Philadelphia had a punk rock scene, right? Like Sonic Youth, some of these bands that came out of there.
00:15:52
Speaker
You know, Bowie was there and Philly recording things and stuff like that. Right. So there was a there was a scene there that required documentation excavation. That's kind of his interest. My interest was more of a kind of Michael Shanksian sort of performativity and DIY.
00:16:08
Speaker
And I think both of us figured out pretty quickly that other people who were, you know, Kostis is pretty smart, so I won't throw him under the bus, but certainly smarter than me, had better ideas of what this was and what the limitations of my imagining of it. And so, you know, it's, it's one of the interesting things is to hear the term be used in all sorts of different ways, most of which were are more
00:16:33
Speaker
interesting, more socially relevant, more disciplinarily relevant, and more sophisticated than what I was imagining, I don't know, whatever. 10 years ago, when me and Costis were shooting emails back and forth, talking about like, what would the archaeology of, you know, arcade fires, suburbs look like, or whatever we're trying to write about. So
00:16:54
Speaker
Do you ever think there's I mean, what was do you ever think the scope for punk archaeology to electric bugle or do you think that it's kind of reflective of a place and time in two thousand and split Dean two thousand and fourteen and just before then for a certain kind of sense of feeling because it does you know, it is a really good book and it's actually available for free.
00:17:21
Speaker
online, I'll have a link to that in the show notes. Do you feel like it is, I mean, have you read it recently? Have you ever looked back on it? And what have people's reactions to it been?
00:17:36
Speaker
Yeah, you know, actually, I had a conversation with Lorna Richardson, maybe two years ago, where she published, I think it was in that world archaeology volume issue, whatever it is, that looked at what I can't remember how it was phrased, but like,
00:17:54
Speaker
I can't remember something about alternative archeologies or musical archeologies. I can't remember what it was. And she and I went back and forth a little bit on, would there be space? Because she offered some very incisive critiques of punk archeology, a particular reading of it, which I thought were, I won't take it over my feelings being hurt because I'm kind of a snowflake. I thought we're really kind of spot on. And so there has been this kind of conversation
00:18:23
Speaker
I don't know, the challenge of everything is there's a million interesting ideas to do. And without that kind of moment, without something that's sort of a flash that gets a bunch of people to kind of coalesce around an idea and, you know, I think to do the work,
00:18:42
Speaker
like I would love to explore the relationship between like growing interest in like various types of and archaeology right and archaeology I think that would be that'd be interesting and useful I think I think the intellectual side of punk has recently been
00:18:58
Speaker
kind of unpacked in literature, in academic literature in ways that make it a little more malleable to punk music, right? And so how do those ideas that, you know, were the stuff that Iggy Pop or, you know, whoever was reading or in the UK, how do we understand the role of, you know,
00:19:18
Speaker
uh crass and some of these like are the mecons or some of these bands that work as various kinds of collectives and how do we understand the way in which i mean so there's stuff to do and stuff to say um but i'm writing two books right now i'm probably going to miss a lot of deadlines so i don't know if it i don't know if it's going to be me to say it i think i take up a lot of space already and probably other people uh could be meaningful leaders but if they need a press there's
00:19:43
Speaker
they're listening to this podcast and say they want to do that. There's a press that's more than happy to take on the labor of publishing it. That's good. I will link to that as well in the show notes. And I kind of want to draw upon something that I kind of find from yourself, some of your work that I thought was really intriguing because I feel like it's I always have a big problem with
00:20:09
Speaker
archaeology and periods of history that are very much cool, interesting. Nobody cares about 13th century farmers in Bordeaux. Nobody cares about the archaeology of brushing teeth. There are things out there that people don't think about. However, I want to focus on the Bakken.
00:20:34
Speaker
if that rings a bell. Could you explain to someone like me who's never been to North Dakota, or never ever been to that part of the world, you were doing archaeology in America, but of something quite contemporary, if I understood it correctly.
00:20:54
Speaker
Um, I do want to hear the origin story. I can tell you another long, go on, go on. This is what I, this is why I have you here. Come on. So, uh, in, in 2003, I start a project in Cyprus, uh, without getting into boring detail. It's tricky for, for
00:21:15
Speaker
new PhDs to get fieldwork opportunities in Greece as a project director. I had an old friend from grad school who's trying to get a project going in Cyprus. He graciously invited me and a colleague over, and this becomes a project called the Pila Cuso Petriarchaeological Project. It's a survey, and eventually there'll be an excavation volume that comes out of that when it's done at some point.
00:21:36
Speaker
So one of our field seasons, we were always like totally punk archaeology project on a shoestring budget. We're kind of crammed in these like apartments in downtown Larnaca, Cyprus. Like we were cooking on electric grills out of this tiny balcony where he had like 25 people who'd be kind of shuffling through our bedroom to get fed.
00:21:57
Speaker
It was suboptimal in lots of ways. So one of the things, once we got a little grant money in our pocket, we wanted to hire a camp manager, someone who could be like a cook, basically, but also who could help run errands, who could drive on the other side of the road, right? We're Americans, we get confused by this stuff.
00:22:15
Speaker
And so I had a buddy here who had finished his PhD in history but was working on a master's in social work because his wife had recently been hired by the social work program here.
Public Perception and Narrative in Archaeology
00:22:27
Speaker
In the US, it's often very hard to find social workers with PhDs. So someone like this guy was very appealing to get him trained up in social work, to drop him into this department to teach social policy.
00:22:38
Speaker
All right, some weird background. I convinced him. He also happened to own, this guy is called Brett Weber, and he also owned a chain of pizza restaurants in Utah in an earlier life. And so he knew how to cook at scale. So I'm like, hey, man, do you want to just come to Cyprus and hang out with us on this archaeological project? You could do some archaeological work if you want, but we really need a camp manager. Like, we'll pay your way. Could be a good time.
00:23:03
Speaker
And he's like, yeah, sure, I have nothing to do this summer. So he came over and did some marathon training, did kind of cooking and camp management for us. But also, I was at the time producing a high resolution map.
00:23:17
Speaker
of our site using a differential GPS, just taking 10,000, 15,000 points. And it was using it as a chance to also do a pretty fine, detailed, if unsystematic survey of some areas that were a little bit rugged and were hard for us to drop survey units on. Any of that. While we were doing this, we started to have this conversation, and this must have been 2009,
00:23:38
Speaker
about what's going on in western North Dakota. We're both eastern North Dakota people at the time, or both still are, and the Bakken. I said, hey, would it be cool to do something like archaeology, but with this guy's policy background so we could bring together a kind of archaeology and policy convergence, right?
00:23:57
Speaker
And the site we've been working on in Cyprus had, among other things, was clearly a short-term settlement. There's a kind of a big normal town on the coastal plain, but up on this kind of coastal height, there was what we still think is probably a mercenary camp.
00:24:14
Speaker
So we've been talking a lot about occasional settlement, short-term settlement. Cyprus is interesting, because in the Bronze Age, we have evidence for basically mining camps up in the Trotus Mountains where they're extracting copper and things like that. So it's a place where you think about not only extractive industries, because the island is so closely associated with extractive practices, temporary settlements that come parallel to that. So we're literally sitting in the Mediterranean, walking around with a GPS deck,
00:24:43
Speaker
I'm sure you've done some of this, how mind-numbing this type of work is, shooting the shit about what's going on in North Dakota. And we kind of concocted this project. At that same time, they were making tons of grant money available for these kinds of projects. And we got together with a bunch of people who are interested, humanities people who are interested, humanities and social science people in Western North Dakota. And yeah, that's where this project that we called the North Dakota Man Camp Project
00:25:09
Speaker
emerged from. And then we kind of put out the call. And so my old punk archaeology buddy, Costis Carellis, was like, he's an architectural historian. He's perfect, right? He hadn't been to North Dakota ever before, other than for the punk archaeology conference, but he was in. The other guy, Richard Rothas, who's now a dean at University of Central Michigan,
00:25:29
Speaker
uh, was in because he was a CRM guy who knew the area really well and is multi-skilled, right? So he could do everything from GIS and digital stuff to, uh, uh, slightly before the era of, of, of cheap drones. So we're still using kites with cameras on gimbals to do aerial photos. He could do stuff like that. Plus he had a really cool big truck. And if you're rolling around the Bakken, uh, Western North Dakota and some sort of state owned, you know, sedan, you were
00:25:57
Speaker
pretty much not going to get a lot of friendly conversations. But if you roll up in, you know, a half ton diesel pickup truck, you are you're fine, you're in the club. So yeah, we just kind of got together. We brought in artists, we brought in other people, we did a bunch of interviews, we have hundreds of hours, over 100 hours of interviews, we have
00:26:17
Speaker
over 10,000 photographs. We have hours and hours of video. And we have a lot of paper documentation, just description. And our primary focus, it wasn't just me and a bunch of my buddies hanging out in Western North Dakota. Our primary focus was on workforce housing, because this was all of the stuff in the US media was about these things called man camps.
00:26:39
Speaker
And we are interested in what these temporary housing looked like in the context of the Bakken oil boom. Bakken oil boom begins around 2008 and 2009, where you have the introduction of fracking to an old oil field. The Bakken formation is not only rather deep, so efficiencies in drilling had suddenly made it relevant again. It's also a little bit tricky to get the oil out of, because it's very,
00:27:05
Speaker
The oil is in very thin shale layers that really have to be fracked. So it's not like in places like the Permian Basin, where you have big reservoirs that you're kind of popping holes into like straws. Instead, this is often drilling horizontally, fracking, which uses kind of an explosive to perforate a pipe and generate pressure, and then negative pressure, which allows you to draw the oil out. So there's this intersection of technology
00:27:35
Speaker
You know, 2008 nine was also a period where you had labor available because you had the housing crash here the economic global economic downturn, things like that. So, yeah, in 2010 and 11 we began documenting.
00:27:49
Speaker
workforce housing out there and using archaeological methods as well as social scientific broadly methods. My buddy Brett is more of a studs circle than a, you know, kind of conventional than a kind of conventional anthropologist.
00:28:06
Speaker
But he could get, he gets, he's 6'2, 6'3, he gets people to talk to him. He has this incredible ability to walk into a room full of like rough looking guys and get them all to have a conversation with him about what it's like to work out there. So yeah, this was this project. And this project's resulted in a number of publications, which, you know, I can tell you what
Cultural Significance and Historical Narratives
00:28:27
Speaker
they are. That seems boring. I can give them to you if you want. So some of which were published by My Press.
00:28:35
Speaker
Some of which were published regionally, like we wrote a tourist guide to the Bakken as a kind of, I don't know, it's my little effort at a kind of an archaeology. Yeah, and then a bunch of kind of conventional articles in places like historical archaeology and Journal of Contemporary Archaeology and stuff like that.
00:28:56
Speaker
are really good examples of kind of like examples of archaeology that doesn't really normally get done you know like this is exciting and interesting pretty because it's interesting how it contrasts with your work in like Cyprus you know with regards to like
00:29:16
Speaker
it's something very old, contrast is something very new, but there's still this kind of connectivity of you can use the same kind of aspects and methods and applications on one as the other. I think that's quite interesting to kind of be able to see the world in these ways to unpick the layers and
00:29:41
Speaker
It's really something special, I think, about archaeology in general. I think this is my biggest question, really, and why I called myself the anarchiologist when I first came on Twitter, when I was first making my brand back in 2014, actually.
00:30:02
Speaker
I think it was because I wanted an archaeology that was different. I was looking for the next paradigm shift and I'm still waiting on it. I religiously read the little blue book, Social Theory and Archaeology by Shanks and Tilly. I read that religiously.
00:30:24
Speaker
I still pull it out as a kind of a thing like, hey, you know, this exists, guys, please. But at the same time, it's old, you know, I could do archaeology about it. I could do like a historical analysis on it because
00:30:42
Speaker
nowadays, there are more things that we really need to think about and talk about. Because for all the all the advances in archaeology, and I'm sure I don't know exactly what it's like in America. But for example, in the UK, archaeology is very privileged. There are not a lot of people from less like economically developed backgrounds or there. No, I want to use different term like those with
00:31:12
Speaker
there's a lot of people from privileged backgrounds and those with money in archaeology and archaeology seems like a luxury pastime. There are many reasons for that and actually it doesn't help the way in which people have to get into archaeology like through degree and stuff, it doesn't really help archaeology. It'd be nice to kind of see an archaeology that
00:31:37
Speaker
doesn't require a degree and doesn't require all this extra work that you have to pay for to do field schools and stuff like that. It'd be good if a punk archaeology arose out of people wanting to collaborate freely with each other.
00:31:55
Speaker
Yeah, you know, look, I agree. I think that this is one of the reasons, you know, you're saying like looking for this paradigm shift. Well, it's hard to kind of conceive of a paradigm shift where it's the same people sort of doing it with the same sort of entrenched commitments with the same, you know, we may fashion ourselves like, I don't know, I've been in like kind of not COVID stay at home mode. So I've let my beard grow really long. It's great. Like this is not like
00:32:21
Speaker
I can let my beard grow as long as I want. It's still not going to make me a radical. It's not going to turn me into Karl Marx or something. I come from an affluent background. I live an upper middle class life. I'm tenured. I'm white. I'm male. I have all these advantages.
00:32:41
Speaker
And yeah, I mean, it's really hard for someone like me to kind of think my way out of that identity. And if we've learned anything from the events, if we've needed to be reminded from the events of the last two, three weeks in the US that deep structural racism isn't simply something that happens to the police department in Minneapolis, but it's something that we're all sort of, that structure our existence, right? And that means things like archeology.
00:33:10
Speaker
So, yeah, I mean, so on the one hand, I would love, you know, at its core, archaeology is not that complicated, right? I mean, I've never had a class in it, how hard can it be? You know, it involves like careful description, it involves like your ability to adapt quickly to using tools.
00:33:28
Speaker
whether it's a trial and my colleagues will yell at me about how I'm not traveling, right? Or if you keep using a pic like that, you're going to destroy your shoulder. Okay, fine. This is true. But GIS has become easier. Databases have become easier. All these kind of tools and management, that manage information have become easier. The barrier for entry into this stuff is no longer this, is not this kind of massive intellectual hurdle. But on the other hand, like archeology is a profession,
00:34:00
Speaker
has has come a long way too right so by requiring archaeologists to have these degrees it is on on the one hand a kind of restrictive right you know it is a way that limits who it gets access but on the other hand it was initially conceived of as a democratizing
00:34:22
Speaker
way of democratizing archaeology, right? That by creating a set of professional standards, it wasn't just the rich dude from
00:34:31
Speaker
you know, wherever on his country estate, who decides to dig up, you know, just dig up and see what's under that big hill that's conically shaped, right, that moved away from, from, you know, the first five, whatever five generations of Mediterranean archaeologists, who are people wealthy enough to be able to take a ship to Greece and like, at best draw things at worst, take things home.
00:34:53
Speaker
by developing a professional archaeology that have these barriers to entry, we ironically were working to kind of open the practice up to people who had what we saw as the professional and intellectual training to be able to do it. That would be a leveling playing field. Of course, the irony is that it hasn't necessarily done that. Our field is still very much too male. Our field is still very much too white. Our field is still very much too colonialist, too affluent.
00:35:22
Speaker
And yeah, I mean, and maybe the call to blow everything up is a little more appealing now than in the 1950s, where in 1950s, where all hyped up on our Binford or whatever, we envisioned or even hyped up on our Schenx and Tilly in the 80s, that we envisioned the ability of kind of radically restructuring the discipline from within.
00:35:50
Speaker
But I think, you know, there can be all the, you know, like, archaeology can do as much as it wants, in terms of how it improves itself. But fundamentally, I think it's important that we don't
00:36:07
Speaker
set too much of a separation between archaeologists and the public, because the archaeologists are also part of that public as well. I think that's a point that Lorna Richardson has mentioned several times. And it's one that sticks with me very, very personally is that, you know, archaeology is not
00:36:27
Speaker
wholly separated from the public. And the public's view of the past is tied to the ability of the archaeology to kind of translate, you know, the archaeology that the public does in the way it absorbs information and processes it. That archaeology is not so separate to what is done by archaeologists themselves. And I think
00:36:52
Speaker
My concern is that like, I think history to society is often this weirdly self fulfilling prop prophecy. I'll put it like this, like there's almost like this. Well, look,
00:37:09
Speaker
If we study the great things that people did before, when we get studied in the future, people will only focus on the great things that we did. And it's this almost implicit filtering out of these certain things over others that are more interesting.
00:37:29
Speaker
it almost it looks as if like it feels to me is that there's this future kind of thing. Well, if we get dug up, and people look back on us, we would hope that they look fondly on us and they take the time to look after our remains and, you know, present us in a good light. But
00:37:49
Speaker
it doesn't really convey, I think there's what's missing is that there's not this sense of like violence of archaeology, you know, of this tearing things out of the ground, of disturb disturbing somebody's grave. And I
00:38:04
Speaker
I don't know how do we connect these two things together? How do we make society kind of think, actually, no, archaeology is this really kind of weird perspective thing on death, you know, like, where is this coming from? You know, like, how do we connect people with archaeology, you know? Yeah, I mean, this is the, you know, there's much smarter people than me have kind of thought and wrote about this.
00:38:33
Speaker
I think you're right in the sense that archaeology has always had this kind of utopian element, which is looking at the past to understand the things in the present, and in many cases, the best things in the present, right? Not always, right? We can look in the past to understand the roots of injustice and things like that. But even then, the hope is that the trajectory that we're on, by understanding this, we will understand the trajectory as
Future Directions and Challenges in Archaeology
00:39:01
Speaker
it
00:39:01
Speaker
whatever, where it goes, it bends toward justice or however you want to articulate it. So yeah, I think there's always been this kind of
00:39:11
Speaker
hope, right, that if we look at the past with charitable eyes, that people will look at us with charitable eyes as well, that they will see the good at what we, and I think that, you know, has an appeal to people, but I think more than that, right, like a lot of the old chestnuts that, you know, we can, you know, roll our eyes at or whatever, still retain, you know, the idea of the Indiana Jones, the idea of, you know,
00:39:39
Speaker
The first question, almost every archaeologist I know gets asked is, what's the coolest thing you've ever found? And so you're like, oh man, I don't have to try to remember some thing I found. I'm a survey guy. What I found is broken pottery, really. I mean, is any of that broken pottery really cool? I don't know. I found this one. It's kind of green. I'm not sure. I found a bowl once. I think it was made of stone. I don't know.
00:40:04
Speaker
But I've had to kind of like reform what I say, right? Because if I respond like that, the public's like, oh my God, you're the worst kind of archaeologist. Whereas in fact, they want to know that exciting thing. They want to hear a story, right? They want to understand something like that. So much of our engagement is in that kind of sense of narrative.
00:40:20
Speaker
I think people are fascinated, I mean, go back to Michael Shanks, by the performative elements of archaeology. They like the idea that an archaeologist is meticulous, right? They like the idea that you're cleaning off stuff with a toothbrush or whatever, which I've frankly never done, but I imagine has been done by people, probably people on my project who were smart enough to not let me in the trench at that very moment. Or, you know, things like that, or even the romance of one of the first things I published was a
00:40:49
Speaker
was a fort, and it was on top of this mountain in the Corinthia. And it's unbelievably cool views. And no one cares about the fort at all. But I occasionally will get emails about, oh, I want to go up to the top of this mountain and see the views from up there, because it looks awesome. It's a very prominent height. And so just the ability to be out in the field and to see the world from different vantage points and different perspectives, that's the stuff that gets the public interested, at least in the kind of archaeology I do.
00:41:19
Speaker
And I think when we were working out in the Bakken, one of the things that became pretty apparent is when we explained to people that we were archaeologists and scholars, historians studying what they were
00:41:34
Speaker
how they were living right now, there was this kind of reciprocal interest in their part in what we were doing. They saw that by us calling what they were, their life situation as archaeological and historical, we were like validating
00:41:52
Speaker
their impression, which was this is a kind of singular, interesting moment, right? That the Bakken boom, this kind of influx of people into this very rural area of Western North Dakota, this kind of strangely austere kind of, yeah, this kind of austere and unforgiving landscape that suddenly saw, you know, whatever 10, 20,000 people show up to work in oil, that when we said, hey, we're studying what you're doing,
00:42:20
Speaker
They were a little less interested in our methods. They weren't even really tremendously interested in our conclusions, but there was the sense that by studying it, we were validating their own experience that this was something unique. So I think there's an element to that also within archaeology to give you a very long rambling response.
00:42:42
Speaker
No, but I think actually it completely highlights the need for, I mean, like they wouldn't, I don't know if they would have been as intrigued that their history was being treated like history and archaeology for study, if there wasn't this sense of there are only certain things that are interesting enough to study. That's true.
00:43:05
Speaker
For me, I don't know how do we destroy this hierarchy. This permeates all the way up. This is why museums currently exist, as they currently do. For me, I'm getting more and more on the side of, look, museums need to go.
00:43:26
Speaker
metaphorically burn them all down, because they're not providing the value that they say they do. What they're doing is providing a structure of hierarchy, in terms of like, this is important history, and this is not important history. And it really shapes how people see the world. I'm like, I'm trying not to make this too topical, but like, I'm sure you've seen a few statues be taken down recently.
00:43:54
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Isn't it funny how people's reactions to that is different than when, for example, at the fall of the Soviet Union, statues of Stalin and Lenin were ceremoniously taken down, or when there was the Iraq invasion and Saddam Hussein was displaced, that his statue was all being torn down, was all over the news, and it was being celebrated.
00:44:23
Speaker
But as soon as that same behavior was targeted at some people with awful history, suddenly it was a big problem. And I think that that's the perspective that we need to change. But it's a very difficult thing to do. How do we get people interested in boring history? You know, how do we how do we how do we communicate that?
00:44:48
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, this is the question that is confronting, you know, I think in some ways confronting the humanities and social sciences. And it's not just that it's boring, but it's boring in part because people don't think it matters, right?
00:45:03
Speaker
even though they variously celebrate or mourn the loss of some statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia, or whatever. So out of one side of the mouth, the stuff isn't relevant. We need to invest in the study. We need to invest in things like culture is a luxury. We need to invest in things that are economic, that will
00:45:25
Speaker
allow the economy to rebound or whatever. We don't want to invest in art. We don't want to invest in history. We don't want to invest in, or if we do, it's because these things somehow survive on the market, right? Like the marketplace of ideas. If history is really important and people care, then money will go to history because we know people care about iPhones and money goes to iPhones.
00:45:48
Speaker
It's just like hyper capitalist archaeology. Yeah, absolutely. And so the question is, do we either concede to that and say we have to get people interested in, you know, the archaeology of toothbrushes or, or things like that, or do we.
00:46:07
Speaker
And I think to some extent that has not only the positive side of things, which is, okay, we're going to get people interested in these things that talk about everyday life, that show the kind of consistencies of everyday life that allows us to find ways in which communities have shared values and shared
00:46:27
Speaker
you know, maybe we can talk, you know, wistfully about shared humanity. I'm not really sure. Or shared identity-forming moments. Or do we go the other direction, which is, yeah, we also need to sell, you know, sell tickets. And that means we need to ensure that our universities remain funded. That means, you know, we want to ensure that there's grant money to fund the next excavation, that it's not entirely driven by salvage. Not that my colleagues who do salvage archaeology don't do really fine jobs.
00:46:57
Speaker
But I think there has to be a balance between kind of research based art research based archaeology and CRM or heritage but you know salvage salvage archaeology, like how do we, and if we're going down the how do we sell tickets road, then we are like on.
00:47:14
Speaker
unwittingly conforming to these ideas of the marketplace of ideas, this kind of capitalist or as my friends in English departments will call it, like this neoliberal view of culture, which means you have to convince people that we should care about Shakespeare. And if enough people care about Shakespeare, then the Globe Theater will continue to stay in business or the Royal Shakespeare Company, whatever, whatever will continue to function.
00:47:41
Speaker
And if you let them down and not enough people care about Shakespeare, then these things will fold and all we'll have is, I don't know, whatever, whatever other playwright there is or whatever other form of entertainment, George Lucas or Ewoks or whatever the hell people watch.
00:47:58
Speaker
And it's precisely this responsibility on the individual. If enough individual actors within the system individually choose to individually change some behavior, that's how this can change.
00:48:13
Speaker
It's ridiculous. This is why I say, this is why I had an episode ages ago called We Are The Decay because I would argue if you look at the history through this neoliberal sense, you're actually, you assign more resources to certain bits of history which are then better preserved and others
00:48:33
Speaker
are less better preserved, and something's less better preserved, it then decays more.
Ongoing Projects and Reflections
00:48:39
Speaker
And therefore, what we have to understand is that this action that we're doing is not neutral. This is the biggest problem is that people think the free market, the marketplace of ideas is this neutral entity from which no kind of like
00:48:53
Speaker
no justified wrong can come from. We have to realize we are the decay. We are causing the decay of certain histories by not allocating them resources.
00:49:07
Speaker
That's an active choice, but by molding it into the marketplace, we created as a passive choice. That's just how it is. People aren't interested. They don't want to know. But people do want to know. This is the big thing. Are you familiar with Derrida's hauntology?
00:49:27
Speaker
Yeah, sure. This is what I would say is an aspect of hauntology in which the future haunts the present, but it's also a reflective echo of the past in the terms that I feel like this form of creating history through neoliberal identification is causing harm and it's damaging the history that we currently have. It's almost like
00:49:57
Speaker
you know, we're trying to yearn for a history that actually never happened. Because the way in which it's presented is always skewed in certain ways, which I think is just, it's something that we need to be able to overcome. But I think as you identified earlier, it's, you know, it cannot be the same people
00:50:22
Speaker
who were moving the needle before, because you can only push things in a certain way to a certain point. There needs to be almost like fresh ideas out there in order to fundamentally change a system. Yeah, and I mean, this is an assumption that the system, however, to go back to your metaphor, that some of these things, the things that are decaying could be seen as simply the
00:50:52
Speaker
the final consumption of the last intergenerational wealth, right? The things that die are the things that run out of resources or never had resources behind it, right? And the things that persist tend to get stronger, right? And they tend to have this kind of momentum on its own and the talk, you know, particularly in, you know,
00:51:19
Speaker
Considering the moment that we live in right now is the way in which these structures, these systems in which all of this discourse is being produced, it's how broken is that? Is the idea of the meritocracy, and in that sense, I mean it in the non-ironic way,
00:51:38
Speaker
Is there a possibility for a system which evaluates people on the basis of their intellectual ability, their preparation, their professionalism? I mean, we all know that there's a difference between, and in the field, it's very obvious, the difference between a good archaeologist and a not good archaeologist, right? This is not something that's really hard to discern. Does that have merit within a professional system?
00:52:04
Speaker
Or is the system itself so fundamentally broken in the sense that the good archaeologist is always going to be not the product of individual agency and their care that they take in doing their job, but much more likely to be a product of their professional pedigree, which is often
00:52:25
Speaker
reflection on their socioeconomic status, which is often a reflection of, is this one of these kids who's been in the field since age 18? Because after their freshman year at some fancy private university, they went off to the Mediterranean because their parents are very wealthy, and they've been doing field work. They have a
00:52:45
Speaker
in some cases, a 20 year head start over someone who goes into the field in their 20s, right, like beginning to dig down the street at a community excavation. And so that that person is always going to have so anyway, you know, all this stuff. I know I'm telling you stuff, you know, but it's how much then then these kind of intergenerational
00:53:05
Speaker
opportunities create this kind of momentum within a system that is fundamentally inescapable. As you say, burn them all down. We burn all the museums down. Not literally. Well, got to make some change happen.
00:53:23
Speaker
Right, right. How do we deal with this? I think it's a very hard thing, especially since so many of us who probably have the ability to make these kinds of changes are also the people who right now benefit the most from a structure that put these
00:53:41
Speaker
structures that put them in place like i would love to pretend that if i grew my beard long enough that somehow like my family's affluence didn't give me the opportunity to do what i do but that's just not the case right like any change that i promote even if i can articulate it in the most sort of culturally politically socially woke way possible is going to be a reflection of the kind of
00:54:07
Speaker
my own situatedness within culture, within economic networks and the like. No, definitely. You mentioned you're currently working on some books. At the moment, do you have titles for those? Are they signs of future work that you're currently, what are they on?
00:54:29
Speaker
I have a couple things that are kind of happening. One, I don't have a title for it, but it's our work in Cypress. We produced a survey volume that you can download for free someplace. I can't remember where, but I'll give you the link to it just in case someone wants to download it for free. And we did three seasons of excavation and that has to come out. The book is like 85% done. It just has to be finished. I'm also writing a, my newer project is
00:54:58
Speaker
a book on the archaeology of the contemporary American experience. And it's really the first sort of survey slash synthetic work on archaeology of the contemporary world in a North American, mostly United States perspective. It's for a book series published by University of the Press of Florida
00:55:19
Speaker
And it's 70% I don't know like on good days. It's 60% done on bad days. It's 40% done Sometimes it's 70% done when I really need to justify having a third beer on a Friday night or something So yeah, those are the things I'm kind of working on and I have like a lot of little you know as everyone does I have like a lot of little stuff that floats around like I did a put together a manuscript under review that's a bunch of photographs from our workout in the Bakken and
00:55:50
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. Maybe that'll appear if it's accepted at the press where it's submitted. I don't know. Maybe not. Yeah, so I have lots of things like that are sort of swirling around. If people want to find out some of your work online, I know you run a blog. What's it called? The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World. And I think it's mediterraneanworld.wordpress.com still, because I've never bothered to buy my own domain.
00:56:17
Speaker
Keeping it real, keeping it real. Exactly. Perfect. And on Twitter, do you spend a lot of time on Twitter? Occasionally, you know, it depends on how wrong people are in the world. If there's a lot of people wrong in the world, I'm on Twitter a lot. But if everyone seems to be behaving, then I have a little sheepdog here that I rescued from Greece a few years back. And yeah, I have the same opinion.
00:56:41
Speaker
if everyone in the world behaves there's no need to bark at them but you know this neighborhood yeah it's a lot of middle class people doing questionable things so a lot of times i'm barking yeah yeah that's great well thank you again for coming to have a nice chat like uh i feel like pretty pretty deep chat this was this was good i enjoyed it so thank you again thanks for having me
00:57:08
Speaker
Why can't you say that the truth was ever free? Expose this modern myth with me! A myth!
00:57:29
Speaker
This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.