Critical Approaches to Fieldwork

Contemporary and Historical Archaeological Practice

Gavin Lucas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134564309
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

This work takes as its starting point the role of fieldwork and how this has changed over the past 150 years. The author argues against progressive accounts of fieldwork and instead places it in its broader intellectual context to critically examine the relationship between theoretical paradigms and everyday archaeological practice.In providing a much-needed historical and critical evaluation of current practice in archaeology, this book opens up a topic of debate which affects all archaeologists, whatever their particular interests.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Archaeology and the field

Not so long ago I was working on a small trial excavation in the village of Castor in eastern England; it involved cutting a narrow trench into a beautiful old orchard garden backing on to a churchyard in order to find evidence for a Roman palace which once occupied almost the whole village. In the end, we did find the remains of Roman buildings on a terrace, as well as a great deal of subsequent occupation which ceased sometime in the twelfth or thirteenth century when the area became part of the churchyard. The process of excavation involved using a machine to strip off the garden soil, followed by hand digging with mattocks, spades, shovels and trowels. In the process, we sought to identify separate deposits marked by differences in their composition, deposits such as slopewash, floor layers, pit fills, walls and so on. Each of these was described on separate record sheets accompanied by measured drawings to scale, and identified by a unique number; any artefacts or other remains such as animal bones or shells were bagged and labelled according to the deposit they came from. Critical to the whole process was understanding both what any deposit represented and what its relationship was to other deposits, i.e. earlier, later or contemporary.

After excavation, all the finds and records were taken back, put in order and checked through; the different finds – the pottery, the animal bones, the coins, etc. – were sent for study to different specialists, each of whom analysed the material in certain ways and produced a report. For example, the ceramicist sorted out all the sherds into different types of vessel based on their fabric and form, quantified this information and at the end was able to say what kind of vessels were represented from the site, what period they dated from, and where they were made. On this site, most of the pottery came from local kilns, but some came from other places such as France, and most could be dated to the latter part of the Roman period. This and the other specialist information was then integrated with the records made on site to produce a narrative which aimed to establish the sequence and nature of events which left their trace under that old orchard garden about 1,500 years ago.

I have just described very approximately what happens on innumerable archaeological sites in Britain and all over the world; the precise procedures might differ, but basically they share similar goals. How is it that we use these procedures? Why do we do it in this way rather than in any other? I ask these questions because I think there has been a notable lack of concern for them in the recent wider theoretical debates about archaeology, in particular with the development of post-processual approaches in the past ten to fifteen years. While one can point to changes in practice which New Archaeology effected – from field survey and sampling techniques to statistical representations of data – can post-processualism be said to have had such an impact on everyday practice? This may seem a harsh statement, since post-processualism is certainly not a purely theoretical, armchair exercise (as some might believe) and its studies are as data-driven as any processual work. But this is not the point. How much has postprocessual theory actually altered the everyday practice of archaeology? When I consider the investigation of the Roman palace described above, I cannot think of any way in which post-processualism has effected the process, yet there are numerous ways in which New Archaeology has. To me, this points to a serious lapse in critical thinking about what we do. Why has this occurred? I am not the first to raise this issue of course (Tilley 1989; Hodder 1989b, 1997; Richards 1995), but one of the aims of this book is to bring the issue to greater prominence through an examination of the historical and conceptual framework within which archaeology is practised today.

I want to begin by asking, perhaps strangely, why do we even go into the field at all? This may seem rather paradoxical, but the very idea of fieldwork is not necessarily synonymous with archaeology as Chris Tilley has argued – ‘digging as a pathology of archaeology’ (Tilley 1989: 275). However, Tilley’s main point is not so much directed towards excavation itself as to the purpose behind it and he believes this should shift from being ‘a process whereby the material traces of the past are recovered and “rescued” to being an exercise in a very different kind of production: the manner in which interpretive experience is produced’ (Tilley 1989: 278). His work with Barbara Bender and Sue Hamilton on Bodmin Moor exemplifies this (Bender et al. 1997), and recent work by Ian Hodder at Çatalhöyük addresses similar issues in terms of a reflexive methodology (Hodder 1997). Both these projects are innovative, positive moves towards reconceiving fieldwork and are discussed further below. But what is the historical context of their reaction? Why do we go into the field, how do we decide what constitutes fieldwork and post-fieldwork, and why do we do things in certain ways in or out of the field?

The ‘field’ in archaeology

The significance of the field

In the paper referred to above, Tilley remarked that much emphasis is given to methods in textbooks, but less on what the end-product is supposed to be (Tilley 1989: 275). What is the status of the ‘field’ in archaeology? We might say that without fieldwork, there would be no material to work on, and therefore no archaeology – it is the bread and butter of all archaeologists, even those who do not go into the field themselves. Whether studying transistor radios or palaeolithic hand axes, archaeologists need fieldwork to sustain what they do, to produce the very material or ‘data’ on which to work. And yet this is perhaps rather too simple. Fieldwork does not just mean the recovery of objects; fieldwork is, as Tilley is at pains to point out, an interpretive exercise, an experience. There is a whole unwritten mythology about the nature of fieldwork.

Fieldwork, as part of a professional practice performed by the scientists themselves, emerged in the later nineteenth century primarily among naturalists and geologists but also among archaeologists and, slightly later, anthropologists (Kuklick 1997: 48). Earlier, most researchers had relied heavily on material brought back by travellers or specially commissioned collectors; going into the field was not regarded as the proper activity of a gentleman, aspects of both class and commodification being implicated in this. This, however, was determined by the proximity of the material. In terms of exotica (whether plants, people or artefacts), reliance on others was largely the case, but with specimens closer to home there was a great tradition of gentleman scholars going into the field. In Britain, for example there was the antiquarian topographic work of William Camden, John Aubrey and William Stukeley followed by that of Cunnington and Colt Hoare, for whom surveying was seen as part of the culture of a ‘gentleman’ (Piggott 1976: 111; also see Ashbee 1972).¹ Different European countries had their own differing emphases, but most (except France) had a history of antiquarians who went into the field (Malina and Vašíček 1990: 27; Schnapp 1993: 154). However, it is questionable how far one can call the work of these antiquarians fieldwork in the sense of modern archaeology.

It is interesting to see that, particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, antiquarian researches were frequently part of the wider study of natural history, and archaeological remains are discussed alongside flora, fauna, and other aspects of the environment (Schnapp 1993: 198). For example the antiquarian Robert Plot’s works were entitled The Natural History of Oxford-shire (1677) and The Natural History of Stafford-shire (1686), and many of the early local society journals were similarly ecumenical in their coverage and entitlement. This idea of a regional approach, based on a topographic and environmental framework became particularly a hallmark of the British antiquarian tradition – the work of Cunnington and Colt Hoare in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries was founded on the same basic approach as that of Stukeley: topographic survey. Excavation was supplemental, merely an exercise in the recovery of artefacts, and ultimately, without written records, such things were often considered mute (Trigger 1989: 70). There was no real consideration of how to engage with the material – it was merely there, attesting to an incomprehensible antiquity. The association between antiquarian studies and natural history, however, was perhaps most marked with prehistoric remains; historical and classical antiquarianism was much more closely linked to art history and was perhaps a stronger theme in early field research in mainland Europe than in Britain (Malina and Vašíček 1990: 27). The eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century excavations in Pompeii and Herculaneum or in Mesopotamia and Egypt are obvious examples.

The real advances were made, not by those who did go into the field, but by those who largely stayed at home and examined material collected by others, whether this came from abroad or closer to home. The major later nineteenth-century archaeologists such as Daniel Wilson, John Lubbock and John Evans did not really conduct fieldwork but relied on collections, and when they did go into the ‘field’ this was rarely to initiate controlled excavation but rather to visit sites and monuments. Typology more than fieldwork characterises the emergence of archaeology as an academic discipline. There are exceptions to this mode of work however – palaeolithic archaeology on the one hand which, from being closely allied to geology, did engage in fieldwork to a greater degree, and, on the other, individuals such as J. J. A. Worsaae in Denmark or those working in the Near East such as Paul-Emile Botta and Austen Layard, or Heinrich Schliemann in Greece and Turkey. However, these exceptions need to be qualified.

Thus palaeolithic archaeology either involved observations of sections already cut, as with Boucher de Perthes’ work in the Somme Valley, or purposive investigation as with William Pengelly at Brixham Cave. Yet, ironically, the sites in the Somme valley only gained academic credence after they had been visited by a stream of famous British scientists including John Evans, John Prestwich and Charles Lyell in 1859. The Académie des Sciences, when first presented with de Perthes’ results in 1846, rejected them (Trigger 1989: 93–4; Schnapp 1993: 311–14). A remarkably similar scenario occurred with the question of palaeolithic occupation in North America, where investigations at the Trenton Gravels were subject to a visit by most of the principal figures in American archaeology. However, in contrast to Europe, the findings were much more equivocal and, in the end, were rejected (Meltzer 1985: 254–5). The situation with other nineteenth-century fieldworkers is more complex. I discuss this in more detail in the next chapter, but Schliemann and Worsaae, despite their more careful techniques and records, have in common the central focus of artefacts and the retrieval of a ‘collection’ which places them in close alignment to that ‘father’ of field archaeology, General Pitt Rivers.

What emerges from this, though, is a division between the fieldworkers and the intellectual elite, which more or less reproduces the same division between the person who collected the material and the museum or individual who commissioned the expedition. In Britain, much of the fieldwork in the latter part of the nineteenth century was conducted on prehistoric burial mounds, and major fieldworkers such as William Greenwell, Thomas Bateman and John Mortimer are not known for their interpretive contribution to archaeology – indeed in most histories they may get only a passing mention in comparison to figures such as Daniel Wilson and John Lubbock. Indeed, both Greenwell and Bateman commissioned other people to excavate barrows for them (the most famous of whom was James Ruddock) as well as paying locals to collect surface flints. In the US, the American Bureau of Ethnology and the Peabody Museum were the major sponsors of fieldwork. Although Putnam at the Peabody is renowned for his own fieldwork, both he and John Wesley Powell frequently commissioned others to conduct fieldwork for them (Hinsley 1974, 1985).

Part of this division relates to the fact that archaeology was part of the wider discipline of the science of man, or anthropology, not only in the USA but also in Britain. The idea of a distinct profession of archaeologists was not fully developed, and fieldwork was highly variable because of the people doing it – all were effectively amateurs, though towards the end of the century there was an increasing concern for professionalisation (Hinsley 1974; Levine 1986: 31, 87). Fieldwork thus played an ambiguous part in archaeology in the middle of the nineteenth century – if there was anything in common in archaeological practice, it was the ‘collection’ rather than the ‘field’, and more particularly the association between the collections and museums and systems of classification (Cole 1974; Chapman 1989; Jacknis 1985). The defining feature of archaeological work before the 1870s was this focus on collections rather than the observation of material in situ (Kehoe 1998: 34), and, even when this did occur, it was, as with geology, from a desire to answer questions posed by these collections. Most archaeologists, as well as naturalists, stayed at home or at the academy waiting for the material to come to them.

It is even debatable how much the growth in fieldwork after the 1870s was not still very much in the same mode – I develop this point further in the next chapter. Someone such as the so-called father of archaeological fieldwork, Pitt Rivers, may not have been quite as we paint him. It could be argued that fieldwork as we understand it today has more in common with the work of Mortimer Wheeler in Britain or Alfred Kidder in the USA and with developments in the early decades of the twentieth century, especially when we consider how it was only at this time that ethnographic fieldwork took on its modern character through the mythic figure of Bronislaw Malinowski (Stocking 1983). One could argue that the dominant concern with universalising classification and evolution meant that fieldwork was still viewed primarily as a means of enhancing the collection rather than an interest in the site itself, and only when the idea of culture as particularistic emerged – that is, culture history or culture groups/areas – did fieldwork become more relevant. The very concern for particularity meant that presence on the site and the site’s own particularity became important too. As long as one views culture as a universal concept, the best place to appraise it is perhaps the armchair – going into the field potentially achieves nothing (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 8).

Franz Boas’s early involvement in museum work in the USA is a good example of this shift in thinking – he attempted to restructure the way collections were organised at the American Museum, an approach which epitomises the Boasian revolution in American anthropology (Jacknis 1985: 77–83; also see McVicker 1992). In contrast to Otis Mason’s or William Henry Holmes’s method of organisation which placed objects in typological groups, Boas argued for objects to be arranged according to tribal or cultural criteria; for example, instead of showing different examples of rattles together, he suggested each should be placed alongside other objects from the same tribal group. It was not that Mason or Holmes did not see the relevance of this approach, but rather that they gave precedence to the typological one, arguing that it told much more about the objects that any cultural grouping (Jacknis 1985). Boas’s approach eventually led him to see museums and collections in general as of limited value, in that they restrict the dimensions of cultural life available for study. It ultimately led to the development of a new kind of fieldwork, one based not on simply enhancing collections but on a concern with a more contextual understanding of cultural lifeways. One can easily see how this is translated into fieldwork, with a greater concern for the specific spatial and temporal contexts of objects. The primary locus of research necessarily shifts from museums and studies to the field (Boone 1993: 330).

The politics of the field

When scientific fieldwork first developed in the later nineteenth century, the broader cultural background certainly fostered its development. Owning or studying collections was often a way of increasing one’s social status (Levine 1986: 11) and, in terms of fieldwork, the idea of travel as part of personal – more specifically masculine – growth encouraged scientists to acquire their own collections (Kuklick 1997). Even for the archaeologist who worked at home rather than abroad (never such a romantic figure), the ‘Field’ remains an arena of personal development with definite machismo undertones. Even if there are no dangerous animals or tribes, it is, at the very least, awful weather. Of course a touch of irony is intended here, but in the early days of archaeology the element of personality was prominent in those texts dealing with fieldwork, and the definition of masculinity came to be implicated in fieldwork practices. J. P. Droop’s small book Archaeological Excavation (1915) contains the infamous epilogue on ‘women on site’, in which he states that ‘mixed excavations’ are a bad idea, but that if women have to be present they ought to be kept separate (Droop 1915: 63–4).

The issue of gender in fieldwork is deeply implicated in the wider acceptance of women into archaeology. Before the issuing of formal degrees, fieldwork was the crucial step towards a career in archaeology, and there was much opposition to women going into ‘the field’ (Díaz-Andreu and Stig Sørensen 1997: 8; also see Dincauze 1992). There were, however, women who did go – women such as the Swede Hanna Rydh or the American Harriet Boyd Hawkins early in the twentieth century and, later, British Kathleen Kenyon. There were also the less visible wives (Hilda Petrie, Tessa Wheeler and Madeleine Kidder) of famous male archaeologists. In fact, wives of archaeologists were often expected to accompany their spouses into the field, though often to deal with finds rather than help with excavation (Reyman 1992: 74). The extension of the exclusion of women from the field was the rejection of any ‘feminine’ characteristics in those men intending to work in archaeology. Flinders Petrie’s Methods and Aims in Archaeology (1904), perhaps the first manual on fieldwork in English, begins with a chapter on the character of the archaeologist, with attention to bodily appearance:

his readiness [to dig] should be shown by the shortness of his fingernails and the toughness of his skin . . . one might as well try to play the violin in a pair of gloves as proffer to excavate with clean fingers and a pretty skin.

(Petrie 1904: 6–7)

This whole chapter of his book reads very much like a colonial handbook on how to deal with ‘natives’, and while Petrie’s work was mostly in Egypt, Wheeler makes similar allusions to the masculinity of the discipline half a century later in his main book on fieldwork which he regarded as ‘an earthly book, inapt to clerkly hands’ (Wheeler 1954: v).

In the USA, John Rowe in his paper on ‘Archaeology as a career’ similarly notes that archaeology requires special characteristics, such as the ability ‘to withstand a considerable amount of physical discomfort without it interfering with his work or making him excessively irritable . . .’ (Rowe 1954, reprinted in Heizer’s Guide to Archaeological Field Methods (1958: 154). One also recalls the phrase attributed to Alfred Kidder distinguishing archaeologists with hairy chests from those with hairy chins, assuming, of course, that all archaeologists were male anyway. Perhaps the most outspoken example, though, comes from Noel Hume’s advice on women on site:

Digging is, after all, a masculine occupation, and while more women than men are likely to do well in the pot-washing shed or in the laboratory, shovel-wielding females are not everyday sights in Western society. If they are to be useful on site (and the right women can be splendid excavators), they must be prepared to be accepted as men, eschewing the traditional rights of their sex. It is vastly time-consuming for men working in one area to be constantly hopping up and down to push barrows for women working in another.

(Noel Hume 1969: 60)

This is undoubtedly an extreme view (though not perhaps for its time), and few could point to such blatant sexism today. Nevertheless, there is still a tendency for male archaeologists to work in the field and for female archaeologists to work in the laboratory or finds room (Gero 1985); and it is not extreme in the slightest to argue that the field remains heavily inscribed as a masculine space – something which has been raised before in other disciplines (for example, see Sparke 1996).

More broadly, the striking feature of many fieldwork texts up to the middle of the twentieth century was their focus on the properly disciplined individual. In Britain, after the 1960s, there was a shift from concern with the ‘character’ of the individual archaeologist to concern with site ‘discipline’. Of course the focus on site discipline has always been there – throughout the earlier part of the twentieth century there was frequent use of military analogies, with references to ‘campaigns’ of fieldwork (Wheeler 1954: 1; Webster 1965: 63; Noel Hume 1969: 54). However, the issue became much more significant as the workforce changed from primarily unskilled labourers to students and skilled professionals. Fieldwork manuals are no longer written for the site director but the excavator. The development of new recording methods and excavation practices in the 1960s, required ‘great site discipline and well-trained workers’(Biddle and Kjølbye-Biddle 1969: 213). The same point is made in what is perhaps the most popular book on fieldwork in Britain today, Barker’s Techniques of Archaeological Excavation, where a section on site discipline argues for ‘a careful balance of that which is self-imposed and that imposed from above; where all t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Finding The Past
• Chapter 3 Splitting Objects
• Chapter 4 The Measure Of Culture
• Chapter 5 Eventful Contexts
• Chapter 6 Conclusion
• Notes
• References