Posted at Feb 05/2006 11:12PM:

The archaeologist as lithic cowboy! ?

Michael: This appeared as the logo for Stanford Archaeology Center when the new building opened in October 2005. At least that is the first time I noticed it.

Bill (Rathje) had done something similar for a seminar series we ran a couple of years back - and what we joked about then (I recall enjoying the ironies with Meg Conkey and Randy McGuire) applies even more to this logo

- that it centers on the excavator's trowel and the lithic arrowhead under a motto proclaiming the connection of past and present.

The flint arrowhead has been seen in archaeology as the archetypical artifact of the prehistoric big-game hunter. Here it sits comfortably on what must be read as its contemporary counterpart - the Mason's trowel - supposedly the primary tool in field excavation.

Set upon Stanford's trees in the rolling hills of California? The big country?

We are presumably to take these as the defining features of prehistory and archaeology - getting out into the open country, shooting an arrow, making one ... or digging one up.

And this on a medal - awarded for services to field archaeology? Or a reference back to the days when archaeologists were coin collectors? (And big game hunters?)

Those who know about archaeological subcultures will appreciate the reference to the "lithic cowboys" - those hardy fieldworkers who see themselves as the cowboys of science.

I don't know who did the design. I am not aware that any of our community were asked about it. I certainly know that many of us have worked very hard indeed against this vision of archaeology now institutionalized in a logo. And I don't want anything to do with it.

Archaeology, for many of us, is not primarily about fieldwork and such finds as flint arrowheads. Archaeology deals in ways of thinking about the relationships we have come to have with material remains, as the Latin motto on this medal suggests. But this also precisely undermines the trowel and arrowhead.

(I am sure this logo was produced innocently and that many will think I am too sensitive. It reminds me of another well-meaning logo produced in the early 70s as part of the newly emerging Cultural Resource Management services in the UK. A great power excavator's bucket was shown holding aloft the stones of Stonehenge - this for the pressure group "Rescue". The logo did indeed convey a popular image of what archaeology was becoming - rescuing the remains of the past from development bulldozers. The point wholly missed was that reaction to crisis (the threatened past) was exactly what the new CRM organizations were fighting. Instead of "rescue", they wanted controlled and anticipated management of the remains of the past - not as exciting perhaps as remains snatched from under the caterpillar tracks of philistine developers, but far more effective in conserving what matters to many of us.)