Metamedia

Matt Edgeworth, of the School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester, has released an on-line, soft book: Acts of Discovery: An Ethnography of Archaeological Practice. An important movement in archaeology has been to turn reflexive attention to the process of field excavation and survey. Yet most archaeologists have restricted such awareness to the end products or results of research; generally the site report or other textual manifestation. Matt has done a great service in reminding archaeologists that we are, in spite of the close disciplinary ties (especially in the States), our own poor ethnographers. We forget to notice the complex exchanges which occur between archaeologists and the material minutiae that constitute 'the stuff' of doing archaeology. Lending an observant and anthropological eye to what these exchanges are when we do archaeology, Matt has made the familiar strange.

As has summed it up himself: Turning the outward-looking gaze back on the treasure-house of material items of equipment stored in the tool-shed and the planning-hut is a strategy that is likely to cause surprise. Such implements are rarely if ever constituted as the objects of attention in themselves; they are used to work upon other objects, and it is those objects being worked that occupy attention. Tools such as trowels, spades, brushes, cameras, scales, theodolites and planning-frames are the mundane things of everyday life for archaeologists working out in the field. Yet these are the implements through which the objects of knowledge are brought to light, manipulated, meaningfully-constituted and transformed into textual data. It is precisely these mundane articles that mediate the subject-object and culture-nature transactions that characterise the production of archaeological knowledge. Any general (i.e. reflexive) theory of material culture should start here. More of Matt's on-line writing projects can found at his site.