Slow

Scale (and Isthmia)

I was really excited to read Katie Kearns’s recent article in Heritage, “Everyday Climates: Household Archaeologies and the Politics of Scale.” It’s open-access; so you can read it too. Kearns argues for the significance of household scale research especially in the archaeology of climate change. This challenges the idea that global problems (or situations) require global approaches best conducted at the macro- if not planetary scale. She calls these approaches “big-scale” approaches.

For archaeology, the lure of big-scale approaches has fed the development of large-scale, collaborative archaeological work that often pulls together large quantities of climate data, site based information, and quantitative analysis. Big-scale archaeology relies on big-data to produce “big archaeology.” There is nothing wrong with this, but for many of us, archaeology remains better at producing small-scale knowledge through the intensive and often painstaking practice of excavation. Consequently there has emerged a bit of a mismatch between our hyper-focused practices and our desire for planetary conclusions. To be clear, Kearns does not argue this, but it feels tacit in her turn to household level archaeology to understand changes in storage patterns, consumption and discard, and gender based household economies. Going smaller teases out the human level impact of climate change and offers a counter-balance to the state, society, and transregional arguments often favored by archaeologists studying climate change.

For our work at Isthmia, Kearns’s recognition of small-scale archaeology was a welcome validation. While we’re not working on climate change, in particular, we are interested in certain phenomenon that like climate change, are often studied on the transregional and global level. We’re interested in the shadow of empire at the site of Isthmia where the massive, imperially funded Hexamilion Wall of the 5th century defines the spatial organization of the area. We’re also interested in using a “Dark Age” settlement of the 7th or 8th century as a way to think about demographic, economic, and social change often considered at the regional level. To do this, we’ve decided to dig down in the complexities of site formation in the late history of a 2nd century Roman bath and the traces of evidence left behind by households that lived in the bath’s ruins for what may have been only a few decades in a period of tremendous instability. Over 50 years of legacy data produced by the Isthmia Excavations supports this kind of analysis.

This is also true for our work at Polis.

I still think about slow archaeology and I suspect there is a connection between slow archaeology and small archaeology. These two approaches lean into the detailed, patient, and careful work that often requires limited focus and often produces correspondingly limited (or human, if you will) conclusions. 

The opposite is probably a kind of fast or big-archaeology. I can avoid feeling today that “big archaeology” (like big science) endures critiques (if not downright attacks) from both sides of the ideological spectrum. Reducing the plurality and complexity of the human experience to data even when it is in the name of progress risks complicity with the very forces that have created many of the contemporary crises from the start. There is a reason why our work is sometimes known as the industrial-military-university-archaeology complex. 

Of course, now, I’m getting away from Kearns’s argument and run the risk of deploying them in the service for things that may not align with her views! Check out the article, though.

Assembling the Fragments of Mobilizing the Archaeological Report for a Future of Reuse

A few weeks ago, I was hard at work on a draft of an article for the Journal of Field Archaeology’s 50th anniversary. You can follow some of the article’s development by tracing the links in this post. The article, “Mobilizing the Archaeological Report for a Future of Reuse: Linked Open Data in the Scholar-Driven Publication”, focuses on my work with David Pettegrew to produce Corinthian Countrysides: Linked Open Data and Analysis from the Eastern Korinthia which appeared earlier in the month from The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. Once I completed my roughest of drafts, I sent the paper along to my co-author, David Pettegrew, and he returned a much more polished and developed draft to me on the weekend.

Now all that’s left to do is tighten up our draft, finish citations, and add figures. This is always a bit more work than we want it to be, but I took a mighty swing at it yesterday and feel like the first two sections are pretty close to being done.

Here they are for your enjoyment:

Introduction

Among the most important results of the professionalization of archaeology in the twentieth century was the establishment of the archaeological report as the end game of archaeological practice and knowledge making. By both fulfilling the ethical expectations for fieldwork and satisfying archaeologists’ responsibilities to funding agencies, the report became the essential tool for communicating with professional communities and governing bodies. The regular output of reports revealed the processes whereby fieldwork generated discoveries and results. In academic environments, the published report also became something more—a means to advancement in processes of tenure and promotion and a measure of one’s standing the field. A well-presented, beautifully-illustrated and often costly monograph could establish the authoritative final interpretation of a building, site, or region for decades to come and guarantee the reputation and credentials of the archaeologist(s) who produced it. 

The digital transformations of the early 21st century have sharply challenged traditional ideas surrounding knowledge production and dissemination, including the process, form, and finality of archaeological reporting. Most obviously, the emergence of platforms for sharing research with professionals and public audiences have made it possible for anyone with an internet connection to access, share, and reuse data. The declining institutional market for traditional book-length publications in the publishing industry, meanwhile, has invited experimentation with alternate pathways for disseminating knowledge that make use of a growing range of digital technologies. Over the last half-century, the Journal of Field Archaeology has contributed to the critical reflection on the archaeological report itself as an expression of disciplinary practice (e.g. Opitz 2018; Hanscam and Witcher JFA 48 [2023] and JFA 11 [1981]). It is no wonder that scholars have begun to radically rethink the relationship between fieldwork, data, publication, and interpretation. 

Over the next half century, archaeologists will need to give greater attention to making the results of their fieldwork more intentionally findable, accessible, interoperable, and usable for future interpreters. In particular, practitioners will need to consider a future of archaeological publishing that achieves greater integration between archaeologist, publisher, and communities of scholars engaged in an ongoing production of knowledge through data production and reuse. Scholars will need to recognize and prioritize the collaborative processes of publication that invite participation and create more inclusive interpretive communities. In an ideal future, the discipline will recognize archaeologists less on the basis for issuing the final word on a site or building and more for their role in activating vibrant conversations among their peers. 

In this article, we underscore an underexplored pathway for reimagining archaeological reporting and data sharing in the next half century: linked open access book published by a scholar-led press. We use as a case study the publication of data and analysis of the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey, a diachronic, multi-disciplinary intensive distributional survey project conducted in the periphery of Ancient Corinth, Greece, from 1997-2003. The core of this work is a published multi-authored online dataset of 25,000+ records freely browsable and downloadable via Open Context, a platform for publishing archaeological research data. The authors of this article developed the book, Corinthian Countrysides: Linked Open Data and Analysis from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (2024), as a guide to understanding, accessing, analyzing, and reusing the open data. The online datasets and linked book make use of low-cost, persistent, and sustainable practices that both build upon existing digital infrastructure and software and evoke a traditional form of publication in a comprehensive archaeological report. Most importantly, this form of publication reflects and invites collaborative archaeological knowledge-making.

Our article unfolds in four sections. In the first, we introduce the concept of conviviality and shared knowledge making to inform recent discussions of multivocal and open-ended archaeological narratives, digital practices, and scholar-led publishing in archaeology. Next, we apply these concepts to a case study from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (EKAS), and the decision of the project to share its datasets through Open Context and a linked open digital book published by The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. In the third section, we describe the ways that David Pettegrew, author, and William Caraher, publisher, prepared the data and book for publication and set up scaffolding to encourage users to reuse data. A final section situates our experience publishing EKAS within the future landscape of archaeological publishing. We highlight how digital-first processes, methods, and approaches offer a compelling trajectory for future archaeological publishing in as much as they deepen reflexive practices and expand collaboration in archaeological knowledge making. In contrast to innovations in archaeological publishing that explore the bleeding edge of technology, our article presents a simpler alternative to reflexive archaeological publishing by outlining the practicality, challenge, and potential of DIY scholar-driven linked open publication.  

Open, Scholar-Led Publishing: A Convivial Approach to Reporting in Archaeology

As long as the JFA has existed, archaeologists have debated the nature of archaeological publishing and its intersections with disciplinary practice. Almost a half century ago, the journal featured a pair of influential essays by the journal’s editor and by a curator of a major museum outlining the ethical issues surrounding the publication of unprovenienced artifacts acquired on the art market (cf. Wiseman and Muscalla 1981). More recently, contributors have brought attention to the potential of publishing archaeology “at the digital turn” (Opitz 2018), the prospects and challenges of archaeological “Big Data” (Various authors, JFA 2020), and persistent gender inequality in publishing in our profession (Hanscam and Witcher JFA 48 [2023]). In short, contributors to the JFA have contributed to ongoing conversations about publishing in the discipline. 

In recent years, archaeologists of all stripes have critiqued the character of traditional reports as field methods, ethical concerns, disciplinary developments, and technologies have changed. Scholars, for example, have called attention to reports and “grey papers” as boring and even unreadable noting that reports’ imitation of the dry, analytic style of lab and field sciences, mark a problematic relationship between archaeological writing and epistemology (Hodder 1989, 200x; Wylie 20xx; Lucas 2018). The ongoing transformation of digital practices in the field have altered fundamental processes of fieldwork, data acquisition, and reporting as a shift to digital-born data has introduced more fundamental questions about the mode and finality of interpretation (Roosevelt 2015; See also the contributors to Averett, Counts, and Gordon 2016; Gartski 2020). As Gavin Lucas has noted, these discussions seemingly anticipate a return to epistemological concerns for the discipline as they emphasize the connection between narrative forms of publication (and exposition) and the changing character of archaeological practices and methods. Giorgio Buccaletti (2017) has shown, for example, how the fragmentary character of digital-born data, in particular, invites archaeologists to make visible the relationship between highly granular archaeological details and long-form written arguments. The fluidity and transparency of this relationship between digital data and published archaeological argument has made it increasingly possible for scholars to interrogate the finality of archaeological reports (e.g. Strupler 2021) and supports the kind of data reuse that encourages knowledge making as a more iterative and community-oriented process. 

The connection between archaeological narrative, digital practices, and epistemology has revealed exciting potential for archaeologists to make use of digital media and platforms to create more engaging modes of writing, to make transparent the foundation of archaeological arguments, and to invite participation in analysis and interpretation. Rachel Opitz’s 2018 article in this journal, “Publishing Archaeological Excavations at the Digital Turn,” for example, offers a good case in point by showing that digital practices in archaeology need not simply reinforce the granular character of digital information, but may open up authentic and diverse forms of narrative and storytelling. Opitz’s description of her digital publication of the Gabii excavations reinforces the potential of data-embedded scholarship to produce more open-ended kinds of publications that challenge the traditional notion of a “final report” and attract new audiences to reports and volumes. These arguments built upon perspectives that have simmered in the discipline for close to three decades on the potential of digital publishing to support more diverse and multivocal narratives (e.g. Tringham 2004; OTHER CITATIONS)  

Our contribution to these important developments in the field will focus on the process of publishing as the locus for knowledge making. In particular, we will emphasize do-it-yourself (DIY) and scholar-led practices as a form of conviviality. In this context, the concept of conviviality draws on the concept developed by Ivan Illich (1975) and encompasses shared practices in knowledge making common in both traditional societies as well as in the close knit and familiar relationships that often characterize archaeological field work (see Given 2017). Conviviality, as this paper will show, represents an open-ended form of collaboration that recognizes the shared agency and commitments to producing knowledge that extends from local knowledge and archaeological field methods to analysis, writing, and publishing. Leveraging convivial practice is even more relevant as the growing costs associated with producing and disseminating digital data encourages do-it-yourself (DIY) approaches that prioritize inexpensive ad hoc solutions through low-lost, off-the-shelf components and open source software. Open source software supported by dynamic and collaborative user and developer communities, for example, often provide workarounds to challenge associated with specialized–and often highly commercialized software and expertise. In much the same way, shared expertise between project directors, authors, digital data publishers, and scholars with book publishing skills has supported the development of collaborative, scholar-led publishing as a low cost and convivial alternative to traditional publishing. As we have argued elsewhere, scholar-led publishing practices in archaeology integrate publishing more deeply into the archaeological processes that start in the field (or even earlier) and continue through the appearance of linked data publication (Caraher 2022). The convivial approaches that emerge from these collaborations are often contingent, messy, and complex, but the willingness of archaeologists to involve themselves throughout the publishing process not only sidesteps many of the structures associated with traditional academic publishing but also embodies the shared commitment to knowledge making as a process that continues through and after publication. In many cases, the forms that convivial, scholar-led publishing produces are unique to the projects themselves and the character of the community responsible for the archaeological knowledge. Moreover, the distinct forms taken by scholar-led projects and the challenges that they face resist the priorities central to the commodified character of traditional archaeological publishing, such as scalability, and deliberately creates pathways for wider participation in analysis, publication, and knowledge-making (Schimmel 2022). 

By extending the convivial processes present in archaeological field work through scholar-led publication, we create an alternative approach to publishing archaeology with both economic advantages and a conspicuous commitment to shared knowledge making. This embeds in the publication process the collaboration central to archaeological epistemology and is consistent with the potential of digital practices to extend the convivial spirit beyond the publication of the book. It subordinates the authority of the author, vouchsafed by the independence of the traditional publishing practices, to the authority of the larger community of archaeologists and future readers who make use of the digital data.    

 

Jacques Ellul, AI, and Teaching

I made a classic mistake this week: I decided to start a 300 page book. It was impossible that I would finish it before the semester started to gain momentum and the waning days of my summer research and writing time would brusquely push aside any time (or honestly motivation) to read a book.

So, I can’t imagine finishing Nolen Gertz’s Nihilism and Technology (2nd Editing, 2024), and this is not because I’m not enjoying it and learning from it. I did, however, find time to read Gertz’s recent-ish piece in Commonweal on Jacques Ellul and AI. (Artificial Intelligence, not Allen Iverson, although that would be awesome). The piece is short enough and good enough that it’s worth just reading. I’ve used Ellul’s ideas in some of my writing in the past. 

The one thing that I took away from Gertz’s (and Ellul’s) argument is that using AI for writing assumes that the inefficiency in writing is a bug rather than a feature. This follows Ellul’s arguments that technology (and more broadly “techne”) has created and perpetuates the privileging of efficiency (and scalability) above and beyond all other goals. Ultimately, efficiency becomes a goal of its own and inefficient processes tend to attract technological solutions. Writing, which is inefficient for many reasons, was a natural fit for technology that aimed at producing greater efficiency. The recent growth of Large Language Model driven AI is hardly surprising. After all, who has the energy, time, and bandwidth, to write the dozens of cursory email that academics write every day?

That said, the reality is that most of my writing isn’t about producing a finished product (efficiently or otherwise). A quick read of this blog makes clear that my capacity to proofread, edit for style, and even articulate myself clearly remains a work in progress. I’ve started to write a few times a week in a notebook to create space for even more provisional writing, stuff that wouldn’t even necessarily have a place in a blog post.

Writing, then, for me is about thinking. It’s about process. And it’s about discipline. 

These are processes that resist efficiency in profound ways. There is no shortcut to the practice of writing 1000 words a day. You just have to do it. There is process to putting together thoughts in an orderly way on a consistent basis other than doing it over and over. And there is no short cut to the benefits that come from writing consistently which range from writing more easily (or at least enjoying writing more) to thinking more clearly (you’ll just have to trust me here!).

For my students, almost all of the writing that we do (99.9% of it) is provisional. None of the ideas that we articulate in class and in papers are meant to be the final word on any topic. What writing is meant to do is help students sharpen their thinking process. The same way reading helps students become better readers. Practicing an instrument helps a musician become a better player.

To circle back to Ellul, then, our job as historians (or as scholars in the humanities more broadly) is to make the argument that what we do and our students do isn’t an inefficient process grounded in antediluvian habits or values, but rather an integral part of the development of historical (and broadly humanistic) thinking. In other words, it’s a vital part of learning to think. 

It might be conspiratorial to observe that thinking is an inefficient process in and of itself. Most animals react more efficiently when they don’t need engage in thought and just react whether through instinct or training. (To be clear, I recognize that a trained or conditioned response does require some thought, but it’s not what we’d recognize as conscious thought.) That said, the inefficiency of thinking is what allow us to understand difficult questions, to address challenging problems, and to exercise discernment. AI for all its glibness with language has not proven particularly adept at framing or even answering difficult problems. And when it has produced valuable new insights, this is largely driven by human inputs. In other words, humans have done the work to formulate the questions, which reflects the capacity of human thinking to search for meaning and order in the world. 

Fortunately, most of my classes privileges the ability of writing to help us not only frame questions but to attempt to answer them. Since this is not the domain of AI — yet, and perhaps ever — it remains fairly easy to explain to my students why it is not a viable substitute for the challenging and inefficient work of writing in my class. 

Three Things Thursday: Zotero, Notebooks, and the Hand Written Book

This fall I have a few little goals that I hope will contribute to some good new habits. Two of these goals are the topic of today’s Three Thing Thursday:

Thing the First

I need to start using Zotero regularly. As readers of this blog know, I surf the web constantly and in my own flailing half-ass way, I try to keep abreast of what’s going on in my various fields. Zotero is citation and bibliography management software and it integrates with browsers, allows you to save PDF files to the cloud, and apparently can do wonderful things with word processing software (although I’ve never used this feature). 

Years ago, when Zotero was shinny and new, I used it constantly, but then about 2018, I fell out of the habit of using it and next thing I know, I’m building my bibliography for my book using Google Scholar and cut and paste. I’d love to say that I learned some kind of lesson, but honestly, I didn’t. I would do it by hand again without much objection. I listened to music, took breaks to read things that I wanted to read, and generally found it the kind of light duty work that was not unpleasant.

That said, my bibliographic habits are a bit out of control right now and since I’m “working” on three or four projects right now, I honestly need something to keep bibliographic sprawl (or downright chaos) in check. This is going to be the year that I lean into Zotero.

(It helps of course that many of my colleagues and collaborators are also using Zotero making it an easy way to share references!).

Thing the Second

Over the last month or so, I’ve started to get into habit of writing in my notebook every other day. It’s not yet an automatic routine, but I’m starting to feel some slight mental slight discomfort when I miss a scheduled handwriting day and the physical discomfort that I used to feel when handwriting for any length of time is slowly starting to abate. Right now, I’m using my notebook to sort of sketch out proto-blog posts (if you can imagine drafts rougher than what I write here), but also to try out new ideas and keep a more time-sensitive log of my reading and writing (sometimes this blog runs a week or more behind what I’m really thinking about, writing, or reading at any given time).

(I’m very much enjoying a LAMY Safari pen with a fine nib. I’ve never really been a fine nib person, preferring to write with medium thickness pens appropriate for my blurry and imprecise ideas, but this pen became an instant favorite.). 

I’d love to imagine that I could get into the habit of writing in my notebook every day, but that feels a bit too optimistic. It’s a “stretch goal”.

Thing the Third

If the first two things on my list are hopes for positive habits, the final thing is an overt fantasy. I started to wonder the other day whether it would be possible to publish a handwritten book. A couple of years ago, I imagined a short book on “slow archaeology.” This would undoubtedly be a vanity project (whatever interest people might have in the ideas) and it is tempting to double down on it by publishing the book in handwritten form.

Of course, there are some questions. First is would it even be possible for me to handwrite an entire manuscript? Right now, I can manage about 30 minutes of handwriting every other day before I start to get fatigued and my handwriting and thinking (such as it is) fall apart. I would have to get better at writing by hand.

Second, there is no chance that I could write out my manuscript only once. I would need to write it at least twice even if I cheat a bit and outline and compose some fragments on a word processor. 

Third, I know that handwritten work limits accessibility and I would imagine that I would have to provide a digital alt-text for the book (especially since my handwriting is impressionistic at best). Ideally I could produce this from the handwritten text rather than simply transcribing the typed text.

Would this kind of thing matter in any way? I don’t honestly think so. I would be quirky, it would be a challenge to do, and it would offer a practical (if patently absurd) perspective on slow practices in archaeology. 

Three Things Thursday: Writing, Wrapping up, and Looking Ahead

I am pretty confident that I’ve gotten “the good” out of my summer research leave this year and feel about as spent as I have in a long time. I have a few more days doing work here on Cyprus and will be heading home for a change of scenery at the beginning of next week. 

As I get older I’m discovering that summers are both too short, in that I never get everything that I want to do done during them, and too long in that I never have enough energy to push through my annual research leave in a productive way (and I continue to structure with the challenge of unstructured time). I think getting home, getting back into my reading and writing chair, and shifting my attention to more pressing deadlines will be restorative!

Here’s a little three thing peaking out from my exhaustion:

Thing the First

Here’s an excerpt from the final report I’ve prepared for our work at Polis! It’s a bit technical, but it’ll give you an idea of some of what I’ve done on research leave:

Introduction

In the summer 2024 season, we primarily focused on our work on the study of trench H10 in E.F2. While our goal was to offer preliminary observations on the architectural phasing, stratigraphy, and chronology of E.F2:P10 and E.F2:H10 excavated over the course of four campaigns in 1996, 1997, 2000, and 2003. This trench is significant owing to the presence of a number of features associated with industrial activities in the area. In this regard, the trench is representative of the larger workshop area south of the later basilica. Moreover, the trench produced a significant assemblage of terracotta figure fragments and lamps. This combined with its representative character encouraged us to document the trench thorough both to contextualize the terracotta figurines and lamps as well as to speak more broadly about the workshops in this area.

 


Big Picture Observations

Trench P10.1996, H10.1997, 2000, and 2003 reveals a complex series of phases and depositional events. The latest walls and burials are Medieval and Late Roman in date. There are also a series of Roman period and Hellenistic walls, a least one relatively well preserved Hellenistic pebble surface, and several features of Roman or Hellenistic date. While it is possible to date many of these features, it is very difficult to associate them with one another. The industrial function of the space seems almost certain. In fact, the difficult in associating features with one another likely speaks to the flexibility of the spaces which may have been rapidly adapted for new functions.

A key element in the adaptation of these buildings is the number of fills that appear to have occurred over its history. The location of the rooms on the west side of a natural ravine likely enticed later builders to fill earlier structures in order to use their eastern walls as ad hoc (or even deliberately reinforced) terrace walls. This allowed them to expand the amount of level ground at the site. The common appearance of rubble levels introduced an assemblage of ceramics that likely derived from domestic contexts and brought massive quantities of residual ceramics that both complicated functional and chronological analysis of the area. Fortunately, these residual ceramics presented a robust assemblage that will allow us to speak more broadly of activity in Roman and Hellenistic Arsinoe. While it is clear the domestic material is unlikely to have come from the immediate vicinity of the trench, it nevertheless almost certainly derived from Arsinoe.

Thing the Second

We’ve managed to spend about a full week studying and documenting an assemblage of material from some excavations in downtown Larnaka. The excavations were not stratigraphic, and as a result, we’re treating the assemblage as we would a survey assemblage. So far, we’re able to compare the material from the various parts of these excavations to those elsewhere in the region including Pyla-Koutsopetria, Panayia-Ematousa, and, of course, elsewhere at Kition (especially Kition-Bamboula). 

Here’s a little sample:

Tomi 5 produced a diverse assemblage of Hellenistic and Early Roman fine wares ranging from Hellenistic Color Coated Wares to Eastern and Cypriot Sigillata which all date to the last two centuries BC. As one would expect at Kition, the forms and fabrics present represent a range of imported and local fabrics. Notable in the assemblage is ESA 4B which is early in the ESA sequence and appears to reflect the predominantly earlier date of the assemblage from Tomi 5. It occurs at both Kition Bamboula, Panayia Ematousa, and at Pyla-Koutsopetria (as well as Paphos, House of Dionysios in 1st century BC contexts). ESA 63/64 appears at Kition Bamboula (no. 31) where it dates to the 2nd-3rd c. AD. A single example of CS appeared in this trench — CS36 — which is rare (an example from Paphos being the best example from the island), and dates early in the CS sequence. This form of CS is broadly consistent with the rest of the assemblage from this tomi which included inturned rim bowls dating broadly to the 2nd and 1st century BC. Cooking pots include variants known from Kition Bamboula, Panayia Ematousa, and Paphos including form CW13b1/PC4 which appears to date to 1st BC-1st AD contexts with some earlier and later variants of this form. This is also the earliest date for the casseroles referred to as CASS1 in Kition-Bamboula VIII and somewhat later in date (1st AD and later).

Thing the Third

This summer my colleague Richard Rothaus introduced me to the potential of AI to streamline certain aspects of our study seasons. For example, he trained CHAT GPT to read hand written inventory cards and organize the data on them to create a draft of a catalogue. To be honest, this blew my mind.

I also read Jeremy Huggett’s recent post on AI in archaeology with great interest and look forward to reading Martina Tenzer, Giada Pistilli, Alex Brandsen and Alex Shenfield’s recent article in Internet Archaeology. 

76 MMT 001_Page_10.

I wonder whether there might be a place for a piece titled “Slow Archaeology in the Age of AI.” The article would explore, on the one hand, the tension between the capacity for AI to produce unexpected results just as noising amplifiers, modified electronic keyboards, and the din from overdriven speakers create mediated sonic textures at punk rock show.  On the other hand, I could contemplate how AIs create another layer of black boxing that separates the archaeologist from the processes that produce knowledge. Even something as simple as transcribing notebook pages and inventory cards forces us to slow down and to think about process in a way that AI obscures. 

Three Things Thursday: Survey, Oil, and Mild Anarchism

Every now and then, life happens in threes and that makes me wonder whether I’m blogging about my life or I’m simply living out a series of blog posts. In some ways, I suppose, it doesn’t matter, but it sure makes three things Thursday a bit easier.

My next few days will be focused (such as I can at all these days) on these three things:

Thing the First

My old survey buddy David Pettegrew has put together an article that offers a preliminary analysis of the Medieval material from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey. This is a pretty exciting piece for two reasons. First, at some point in the distant past, it was originally intended to be a chapter of his soon to be completed book on the material from EKAS. When it dropped out of that volume, it wandered a bit in the wilderness before he found a home for it. 

Because these are hectic times for all of us, and writing about archaeology in the best of situations often takes a village, I offered to help get this article into final shape. One of the things that I’m working on is adding hyperlinks to the EKAS data in Open Context. This will allow the reader to drill down into the data from the article text, validate David’s arguments, and ask new questions from the raw material. This could mean looking at the data spatially in new ways, aggregating new assemblages based on material fro the same survey unit, or even connecting this data to other publicly available data sets. 

With David’s permission, I’ll share some of the linked assemblages new week.

Thing the Second

Last year, I wrote a short piece on the archaeology of petroleum production. My buddy Kostis Kourelis is pretty sure that the archaeology of oil will be next big thing. Oil is not only the quintessential modern hyper object, but also represents a type fossil for supermodernity. My article mostly just scratched the surface of the potential of an archaeology of oil as a key component of archaeology of the contemporary world as well as the kind of critical archaeology that offers new ways of understanding the modern age.

Part of the reason for this is because the article is destined for some kind of handbook of the archaeology of plastics. In fact, the editors and reviewers patiently pointed out, my article needed to connect oil and petroleum production to plastic more explicitly throughout. This was a fair point and I’ve been nibbling away at their helpful comments. 

In many ways, their urging that I connect petroleum production to plastics was more than just appropriate for the volume, but also useful for reconsidering oil and petroleum production as the definitive phenomenon of the supermodern world. The ubiquity of plastics in our everyday life is just one example of oil’s central place in our contemporary society. That said, plastic manufacturing and petroleum production rely on shared spatial footprints. The profoundly toxic sites of petroleum refineries attract similarly toxic petrochemical manufacturing plants that churn out the stock from which most new plastics are made. These plastic pellets then find their way into the world through some of the same infrastructure as our gasoline, heating oil, and other forms of petroleum that we use as fuel. In other words, plastic and oil share more than chemical DNA, but also leverage the same infrastructure that allows both to be always at hand in the contemporary world. Stay tuned for a plasticized draft.

Thing the Third

The third thing that I’m working on with a mid-February deadline is the revision of an article on a class that I taught as the centerpiece of the Wesley College Documentation Project. The article celebrated (I admit) the prospects of a “mildly anarchist” pedagogy that undermined the increasingly bureaucratized nature of both the modern university and archaeology as an industry. It attempted to embrace many aspects of slow, punk, and anarchist archaeology. Unfortunately, it also appears to have captured some of the more traditional elements of writing about archaeology as well. Namely the congratulatory nature of so many fieldwork publications that elevates the archaeologist from the deeply collaborative space of archaeological knowledge making to the august heights of heroic truth teller. 

This, of course, was the opposite of what my paper was intending to accomplish. I was hoping to celebrate the remarkable creativity that occurred over the course of a spontaneous, place-based, research program freed from much of the administrative oversight that can stifle the simply joy of wandering an abandoned place, thinking about the past, and working together to make sense of a building and its history.

That all said, the reviewers were probably doing me a favor by telling me to temper my congratulatory tone and do what I can to ground my excitement for the project in the dusty and incomplete world of reality. The last thing I want to do is to alienate a reader or conform to some kind of stereotype of ego-driven, tenured, middle aged, truth teller. Stay tuned for an updated and tempered draft. 

Digital Archaeology in Review

Over the weekend, I got a chance to read Colleen Morgan’s thoughtful review of digital archaeology published in the Annual Review of Archaeology this past month. The piece surveys recent trends in digital archaeology and, more important, urges the discipline forward toward a more reflective, ethical, and meaningful directions.

Unlike many approaches to digital practice in archaeology that trace the emergence and advantages associated with particular technologies, Morgan’s article steps back and focuses on how technology and practices produce new forms of knowledge (and new ethical problems and perspectives) for archaeologists to consider. To do this she focuses on four areas: (1) craft and embodiment, (2) materiality, (3) the uncanny, and (4) ethics, politics and accessibility, which she develops sequentially across the article.

The first two areas were pretty relevant to how I think. Her review of recent work that considered craft and embodiment, for example, makes clear how the changing skill sets associated with archaeological practice create new forms of archaeological knowledge. While my work, especially as associated with slow archaeology, has tended to view certain forms of technological change which shape our bodies in new ways and produced new forms of knowledge. On the one hand, this asks us to consider matters of commensurability between knowledge produced today and knowledge produced using older techniques and technologies. Morgan pushes this further to ask how contemporary digital approaches complicate our ability to empathize with people in the past and the present. The former are almost always the object of archaeological inquiry and the latter should be a concern of anyone working in archaeology especially as labor conditions in both academic and commercial archaeology have become a growing concern for the discipline.

I also very much appreciated her consideration of the materiality of digital practice. Not only does this force us as archaeologists to reflect upon the increasingly disposable character of the technologies that we use, but also the human costs of the networks of production and discard that make this technology possible. Here Morgan’s work intersects with both media archaeology and archaeology of the contemporary world. Her call for us to reflect on climate impact of digital archaeology is important. This not only involves the literal climate but also the social conditions necessary to produce the technologies (in their material and immaterial forms) that digital practices require.

The penultimate consideration of the article is perhaps the most provocative. Morgan considers the capacity of digital practices for creating uncanny encounters with the past. These uncanny encounters – manifest in their most simple forms as certain kinds of immersive digital environments and in more complicated ways as “deep fakes” – have the capacity to evoke emotional responses that range from the unsettling to the playful. How digital archaeology develops this heightened capacity for the uncanny will almost certainly exert a powerful influence over the future of the discipline.

Finally, Morgan explores the ethical and political landscape of digital practices. This is a complex matter, of course, that will invariably continue to exert a massively formative influence over discussions of digital archaeology for years to come. The gender make up of the field, our obligations to communities who don’t have access to the same technologies and skills, and the fate of digital data in both archives and online reflect the emergence of a new series of significant political commitments in the field. The capacity for digital archaeology to create “interventions” that allow indigenous communities to communicate their heritage and traditions expands on the potential for digital archaeology to produce politically meaningful knowledge. 

This article is short, but its utility and significance should be long. There is a tendency to see the landscape of digital archaeology to be a changing one and contributions to the field as ephemeral as the next technological leap. While the references in this article will not stand the test of time, I do suspect that Morgan’s framing of the debate will influence future discussions of digital practice for some time to come.

Reflecting on Slow

Last week, I got together with an old buddy for dinner and he asked me to talk a bit more about the idea of slow especially in light of my post “Slow at 50.” Since I’m restarting the archaeological fieldwork aspect of my professional (albeit as a study season), it seemed like a reasonable time to write a little bit about slow more broadly.

When I started thinking about slow in archaeology, I imagined it as a tonic to a growing fixation on archaeological efficiency and its dependence on digital tools. Slow archaeology wasn’t so much a rejection of the benefits technology, but the critical engagement with how our tools shape the knowledge that we produce. As I thought more broadly about the implications of slow for archaeology or academia more broadly, I started to hope that an emphasis on slow might shift our emphasis from doing more to doing better and in this way, we might change the character of academic work.

For me, this would involve critical reflection on academic work and perhaps even an impulse to parse how modern, industrial practices have informed standards of professionalization in academia. I am particularly interested in unpacking the roots of certain academic work patterns in craft. For example, teaching practices associated explicitly with the hands-on learning or grounded in apprenticeship tend to cleave more closely to craft models of knowledge production than those informed by industrial practices. Industrial education, especially at the university level, seems to emphasize the fragmentation of learning into interchangeable chunks which over time produce a well-rounded student.

More broadly, I wonder whether how I started to think about slow some 6 or 8 years ago has now evolved into something wider, but still distinctly rooted no in the literal idea of slowing down, but in the notion of living more deliberately. This involves thinking more carefully about the things I do and making sure that they align with what I value rather than the various expectations foisted on me by colleagues, institutions, and situations.

I understand that this is a kind of privilege afforded to a very small number of tenured faculty who simultaneously find ways to operate at the fringes of the system and reap the benefits of the system, its resources, and its protections. That said, I do hope that reflecting deliberately on the opportunities that my position has allowed me ensures that I do more with what I have than rather than less.

At 50: Slow at 50

I turn 50 this week and I’ve been thinking a lot about what this means. After all, a half-century doing stuff feels like it should mean something, right? So I decided to do some little blog essays mostly to reflect on my professional (and occasional personal) life at 50. Yesterday I blogged about being “Not Full at 50” and today I turn my attention to my always developing thoughts on slow. 

Over the last decade, I’ve been thinking a good bit about ideas relating to the slow movement. I produced an edited volume of a literary journal dedicated to “slow” and published a little gaggle of articles that consider “slow archaeology.” This work, as any reader of this blog probably knows, tends to focus on the idea that slow, focused, and often embodied work, while often inefficient by contemporary standards, produces substantively different outcomes than work that privileges efficiency. These conclusions lean on scholarship that unpacks the distinctive character of certain kinds of slow work from hand drawing to walking the countryside, long form descriptions, and excavating.  

Recently, I’ve been talking with a few graduate students about work load expectations in graduate school and these conversations align neatly with recent debates about faculty work load. There is no doubt that many faculty members and students are feeling overwork and the last two-years of pandemic-inflected work has exacerbated this feeling. A few students have told me that it is hard to find the time to engage in the slow processes that are necessary for their creative work and argued that their workload is making it impossible to find a healthy work/life balance.

I don’t disagree with their assessment and worry a good bit that student workloads at the undergraduate and graduate levels are no longer reasonable in light of changing students responsibilities both in school and outside of school. In one of the more thoughtful critiques of “slow,” Shawn Graham reminded me that working slowly is often a privilege that relies, at worse, on other people scrambling to pick up the slack, or, at best, is a luxury afforded those who have a certain amount of material and professional security. This assessment however tends to see “slow” as less productive or efficient than “fast” work rather than substantively different.

Recently, I’ve started to realize that my work habits are very slow indeed. However, they don’t really involve the kind of deliberate, contemplative practices that we so often associate with slow work. Instead, I tend to work on a number of projects simultaneously. I flit from one project to another over the course of a week and often spend time simultaneously writing, reading, doing email, and surfing the web. I am, of course, familiar with the literature that has argued that these work habits are bad for our brains and our ability to concentrate and focus, and suspect that there is real truth to these claims. At the same time, I rarely find that I prefer to work and particularly write in a distracted way. I find taking a dozen small breaks over the course of an hour consistent with how my brain works. In fact, I find forcing my brain to remain locked onto a single task incredibly exhausting and unpleasant. Sometimes, when proofreading or revising a sustained argument this kind of concentration is necessary, but even then it’s rarely pleasant.

This got me wondering whether the effort to normalize this kind of focused concentration has more to do with expectations of efficiency than more expansive views of how our brain and our lives work. I’ve started to think that my version of slow work, then, reflects my own distracted approach to my work as a scholar and teacher. Instead of focusing on producing predictable outcomes, I’m becoming more and more interested in figuring out sustained and sustaining practices, and for me this involves leaving myself open to distractions and putting aside well-meaning, but often misguided arguments for working and life.

So as I turn 50, I’m trying to embrace my own slow workflows and recognize my unique work habits as sustainable and healthy. Rather than seeking some kind of work/life balance or seeing time (or hours) as a measure of how much work I do. Instead, I’m trying to embrace my own slow habits as an antidote to certain expectations of efficiency. My hope is that these approaches will help me develop more sustainable habits that not only allow me a sense of satisfaction with my daily life, but also keep me productive in my career and as a good collaborator, contributor, and colleague to my various communities.  

A Memorial for a Digital Friend: Diana Gilliland Wright

Yesterday, I learned that Diana Gilliland Wright had died earlier this month. I didn’t know her very well and, in fact, I can’t exactly remember if I had ever met her. I knew her mostly via email, comments on my blog, and her own voluminous blogging output.

Over the last decade, as my research interest shifted toward the Argolid, she and I corresponded a bit more regularly as she offered us the occasional insight based on her years of work on the city of Nafplion and its environs. From what I can gather she wrote her dissertation on a 15th century Venetian administrator at Nafplion, Bartolomeo Minio. I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve never read it. Nor have I read any of her formal scholarship. What I did read, quite regularly, were her blogs.

Year ago, when blogging was still fresh and exciting and filled bloggers with hope, we envisioned a world where bloggers read each others’ work and reached out to one another and commented and shared each others’ work through hyperlinks and blogrolls and ultimately forged relationships across networks of blogs. Diana Wright did all that and was a regularly commenter on my blog from its earliest days (on Typepad!). And even as the promise of blogs as a corresponding medium faded a bit, she continued to reach out via email to offer comments and ask for publications. I remember sending her a few copies of North Dakota Quarterly at some point as well and hoping that she found the poetry and fiction in those pages interesting.

From what I can piece together she ran two blogs. The blog that I knew best was called “Surprised by Time” and it largely focused on the Medieval Morea (or Peloponnesus). Her interests were wide ranging and did much to make transparent murky waters separating the Medieval and Early Modern worlds. The scions of Byzantine elite families rubbed shoulders with Venetian administrators, on assignment, Ottoman officials, and Mediterranean diplomats, literati, and ne’er-do-wells. Palaiologoi cross paths with Italian merchants and Ottoman travelers, Pashas, and poets. Each of the over 200 entries, offered a startling glimpse into a world often overlooked by scholars preoccupied by tidier narratives of rise and decline of empire and neglectful of the messier interface of daily life among those most effected by political and cultural change. To Dr. Wright’s particular credit, the blog exists under a CC-By-SA license meaning that anyone can share her work as long as they credit her and make their work available under an open license. The blog appears to be fairly well archived by the internet archive, but I would be keen to entertain ways to preserve it more formally. 

For many years, she also maintained a landing page of sorts called “Nauplion.net” where she offered an index of her work and the work of her partner Pierre MacKay which featured regularly on her blog. It also featured links to many scans of hard to find primary sources some of which were translated on Surprised by Time. This site is no longer working and hadn’t been updated in many years, but it is preserved on the Internet Archive.

[By coincidence, I’m teaching Evliya Çelebi this week and using Pierre MacKay’s translation of Evliya’s visit to Corinth in my class. Diana Wright posted bits and pieces of Pierre’s translation and the story of his discovery of Evliya’s manuscript on her blog.]

Her other blog, Firesteel is an anthology of poetry gleaned from ancient and modern sources and from Greek, Ottoman, Arab, Italian, French and English language poets. I don’t know whether the poetry posted here and her more academic content crossed paths in some kind of formal way, but it really is an amazing collection of work (which I suspect violates all sort of copyrights, but I get the sense that Diana Wright just didn’t really care). 

~

As a small, digital memorial to Diana Gilliland Wright’s passing, I would encourage you spend a moment looking at her online legacy and recognizing it as a gesture of a kind of digital kinship that could connect individuals who had never met. For whatever reason, her profile included a link to John Coltrane’s 1957 recording of “While My Lady Sleeps.” It feels like an appropriate soundtrack for a visit to her digital world. 

. . . a little wine for remembrance . . . a little water for the dust.