Archaeology/Politics

Michael Shanks

to appear in The Blackwell Companion to Archaeology, edited by John Bintliff

The politics of archaeology: some scenarios

Controversy, 1986 in Southampton UK – what stand should be taken on the participation of archaeologists from South Africa in one of the largest international gatherings of the discipline? South African archaeologists are excluded from the conference on the grounds of sanctions against apartheid. Arguments erupt over academic freedom. The World Archaeological Congress becomes its own organisation after being expelled from the UISPP (the Union Internationale des Sciences Pre- et Protohistoriques). It claims to represent fairly the interests of archaeologists from post-colonial societies and declares its aim of diminishing the influence of archaeological models and organizations centred upon Europe.
Peter Ucko:
"For months I acted as a traditional academic would, arguing that academic freedom was more important than anything else, and I claimed to myself and others that one could be totally against apartheid while at the same time doing nothing about it in the sphere of academia. Shockingly, it took many months for me to realise what a patronising stance I was adopting."
(Ucko 1987, 4)

In 1985 in a culmination of weeks of violent tension and after experience of previous years, police use force in preventing ‘travellers’ – itinerant people – from attending the midsummer solstice at Stonehenge. One of the most visited and iconic of archaeological sites in the world, the monument is indeed suffering tremendous erosion from visitors. The official reason for the expulsion: to protect the prehistoric monument.
Barbara Bender:
"The police have spent over £5 million policing Stonehenge. The government have passed a Public Order Act and a Criminal Justice Act. The police can now arrest two or more people ‘unlawfully proceeding in a given direction’, and can create ‘exclusion zones’ to prevent confrontation. The antagonism towards the traveller is not surprising. At the end of the day England’s landscape is a proprietorial palimpsest. The travellers own no land or houses, and pay no direct taxes."
(Bender 1998, 130)

In 1990 the US government recognises, after a long campaign by pressure groups, the right of native American groups to claim back the archaeological remains of their societies held in academic collections – the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
(http://www.uiowa.edu/~anthro/reburial/repat.htm)

In 1992, members of the Department of Archaeology at the University of Zagreb publish a booklet which outlines the political programme of systematic destruction of archaeological sites in Croatia, part of the former Yugoslav republic. (Department of Archaeology Zagreb 1992; Chapman 1994)

In 1994 a final session of the World Archaeological Congress in New Delhi erupts in hostile argument. Dispute still continues over the history of the site of Ayodya, archaeological evidence being cited for and against the presence of a Hindu temple pre-existing to the Muslim mosque, which has been demolished by Hindu fundamentalists. (Rao 1994; Colley 1995)

In 1995 in a remote forest in west Wales, an arts company mounts a multimedia and bilingual performance on an archaeological ruin of a farmstead, raising issues of cultural identity in the wake of English state appropriation of land in Wales. (McLucas 2000)

In 1995 an American archaeology lecturer from a British university is expelled from Bulgaria allegedly for spying, though no evidence or charges are brought forward; ideological differences with the Bulgarian state archaeological service are cited as relevant. (Bailey 1995; Steele 1995)

In 1999 the Greek state continues to lay claim to 2500 year old marble sculptures taken from the Athenian acropolis at the beginning of the nineteenth century and still on show in London, on the grounds that they are exceptional symbols of Greek national identity. (Greenfield 1996, chapter 2)

The politics of archaeology acknowledged

These are just a few examples of what may be called the politics of archaeology. It would not be difficult to extend the list. No archaeologist in the 1990s remains unaware of the connection their work may have with political interests, though many may wish to deny it and maintain ideas of academic neutrality. Nor are the issues clear and rooted in polarized interests. They are not about stuffy conservatives and progressive radicals. Things are far more difficult, and interesting, than that.

It is not that archaeology ever was an exploration or discovery of the remains of the past free from political import, though some would hold that it was and still can be. But it is distinctively the case, as I hope this list partly shows, that there has emerged since the 1970s a significant, explicit and new acknowledgement of the political dimensions of archaeological work.

A personal anecdote may help illustrate this new acknowledgement. In the mid 80s, and at the time of the first World Archaeological Congress mentioned above, a colleague and I argued, with others in archaeology and in related fields, that the politics of our discipline should be recognised. We thought we carefully reasoned that the role of the archaeologist as intellectual worker brought political responsibility. We considered how archaeology could be an ideological force for good or evil. Although our discussion was part of a long debate about academic value freedom going back at least to the origins of the social sciences in the nineteenth century, we were widely criticized and even denounced for polluting the discipline with irrelevancy. Several publishers turned down a book of ours on the recommendation of their reviewers that it was not their duty to promote the political pamphleteering we supposedly represented.

Consider how things have changed. Fifteen years later the place of the past in the present is a major part of archaeological debate, a subdiscipline even, with journals, conferences, academic courses and professional qualifications in the management of cultural resources. All deal in depth with issues easily classified as part of the politics of archaeology. And our book is still in print (Shanks and Tilley 1987).

The politics of archaeology: academic contexts of dispute

So what has brought this shift, this awareness and concern for archaeology’s political role?

One factor is the growth, spread an acknowledgement of the relevance of what is usually called critical theory.

It is appropriate to mention David Clarke’s classic essay of 1973, ‘Archaeology: the end of innocence’, which appeared in the journal Antiquity. Drawing attention to the development of what he called a critical self consciousness in the discipline, the article described a new archaeology pulled out of its introspective focus on its subject matter to consider its shape and place in the humanities and sciences. Elsewhere (1972) Clarke had sketched the shape of a discipline radically different to the archaeology accepted in the 1950s. The very character of archaeology was under question by a new generation, typified by Clarke himself. They argued that the quiet common sense of a traditional archaeology concerned with writing descriptive historical narrative must give way to a sophisticated and professional academic process of theory construction and testing. This was the loss of innocence of Clarke’s essay – archaeology was to take its place as one of the social sciences with a critical attitude of doubt and suspicion about its goals and practices. Questions were raised concerning the status of archaeological practices and claims to know the past.

Since the late fifties there had been a growing challenge to the intellectual and academic location of archaeology. A powerful case was articulated for archaeology being an anthropological science, rather than a ‘handmaiden to history’ (Trigger 1989, 312-18; Watson, LeBlanc and Redman 1984). Clarke was, of course, one of the proponents of this ‘new’ archaeology, with his own views developed in dialogue with the new scientific geography (1968). The interest of the new archaeologists in radical debate about the very character of their subject was not isolated. A wave of theory building and disciplinary critique was rolling through the social sciences and humanities. Clarke was right to associate both with a reflexive self consciousness about academic aims and methods. I see this as an essential context for an interest in the politics of disciplines.

From the beginning there was an uneasy, if often unvoiced, tension between the two fundamental elements of this ‘paradigm shift’ in archaeology, as it has been called (Meltzer 1979) – the emphasis upon a solid scientific grounding of archaeological knowledge, and an enthusiasm for theoretical critique and reflexive self consciousness. The first tended towards an isolationist view of knowledge – value-free science as a force independent of its social and cultural context. The second encouraged a connection between academics and the location of their work – standing back and considering how social and cultural forces may impinge upon the construction of knowledge (as in Trigger’s History of Archaeological Thought, 1989). And indeed this tension is evident in Clarke’s own work, though he is often now simply associated with ‘new’ archaeological science: he was very conscious of archaeology as a disciplinary community (that article with which I began this section) and explicitly acknowledged the preconceptions held by every archaeologist and which tied them to their cultural milieu (consider figure * in Clarke 1972).

So it is clear that many new archaeologists were dissatisfied. They found fault with the way archaeological knowledge and practice were being justified, with the view of archaeology as one of the humanities, its knowledge founded upon the academic status and reputations of its practitioners rather than the objective (read neutral and scientific) merit of their work. This is the significance of the turn to positivist social science so clear in new and processual archaeology. Science is seen as a neutral independent force in the service of truth claims, and archaeology, to be a respectable and responsible academic practice, should be scientific (Shanks and Tilley 1992, Chapter 2; Binford 1987). This is one answer to the question of the relation of intellectual work to society – science is neutral and detached commentary on society and culture, an independent tool for various political purposes.

On the other hand intellectual critique and theory-building have long been associated with left wing thought and intimately tied to a programme of social change. This connection between academic theory and political practice is encapsulated in Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach, that philosophers had so far interpreted the world whereas the point was to change it (1970, 123). In this position it is not conceived possible or appropriate to separate the practices which make up science, academic claims to knowledge, and society. Theory building has here focused upon the nature of the relationships between academic work, disciplines, society and culture (Lampeter Archaeology Workshop 1997).

A factor in the explosion of the discussion of theory in the social sciences and humanities since the 1960s is certainly the emergence of the new left (Gombin 1975). This was, and still is for some, a broad and multifaceted concern with rational responses to the failure of socialist programmes in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, particularly after the soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. The appetite for rethinking and reconstructing ways of thinking about culture and society was sustained through the radical student politics of the 60s, and the expansion of universities and the higher education sector seen across the developed world in the second half of the twentieth century. The role of the academic as cultural critic has been subject to extraordinary inspection. The fundamental question is whether academics can stand back detached from their subject matter and their place in society.

Clarke claimed that the self consciousness emerging in archaeology was a critical one and I certainly see the new archaeology, as well as further changes in archaeological thinking, as programmes of critique. Indeed changes in archaeological thought in the last three decades can easily be interpreted as cycles involving critque, formalisation of a position, then further critique (consider culture history brought under critique by new archaeology, this formalised as processual, followed by post-processual standpoints). Theory building in the social sciences and humanities more generally incorporated a broad field often termed critical theory. This has both a particular and more general reference. The first is to the branch of western marxian thought which developed in the twenties and after, as an intellectual expansion of marxian thought into areas of culture and consciousness (Anderson 1976). It is frequently associated with the work of members and associates of the Frankfurt School of Social Research, and with debates around their work which still carry on. Familiar names here are Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Benjamin and Habermas (Held 1980; Geuss 1981). The second more general and often unspecific use of the term critical theory. is to refer to a restructuring of the social sciences and humanities around various agendas and debates focused upon continental, particularly French, philosophy (Culler 1982; Dews 1987). Names which may be mentioned are Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard. The broad reference of the term comes from its use in literary studies to refer to theories of criticism. Here critical theory is commonly connected with poststructuralism, cultural commentary on postmodernity, new feminism and a wide range of postcolonial cultural thought.

This is not the place here to review critical theory, to which there are many introductions (Calhoun 1995 is relevant to this chapter). It is important nevertheless to draw clear attention to three elements of critique which are central to our understanding of the politics of archaeology and how it has become the issue it now is.

The first is the wide-ranging concern in critical theory with the sociology of knowledge. This can be traced back to Kant’s critiques and includes work in phenomenology after Husserl and Schutz. Notably it centres upon those who have considered the social context of the construction of scientific knowledge (Fuller 1993; 1997) – from Mannheim through Thomas Kuhn to contemporary constructivist thought (Schwandt 1994). The latter emphasises the inseparability of social location and claims to truth, upholding the argument that there is no truth in and of itself, beyond society, culture and history.
The second element of critical theory I wish to emphasise is feminist critique (Andermahr, Lovell and Wolkowitz 1997). A broad range of sometimes contradictory work has raised awareness of the gendered bias of the construction of knowledge and the production of culture. This has involved both criticism of the sociology of disciplines, for example the systematic inequalities rooted in gender which lead to disproportionate success accruing to male academics and professionals, as well as the inherent gender bias of some systems of knowledge.

The third, and more specific, aspect of critical theory is a critique of anthropology (Marcus and Fisher 1986; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Clifford 1988; 1997). This may be seen as self consciousness and questioning of the role of anthropological science in a world after the dissolution of the old western European empires. Here the interests of the discipline of anthropology, archaeology included, have been traced to the colonial expansion of newly industrialised nation states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, encounters with western enlightenment’s cultural other, and an assimilation of ‘other’ people, theorised as ‘exotic’, into objects of scientific and academic study (Fabian 1983; Herzfeld 1987). The critique proposes instead that we should see the relationship between anthropologists and others as a social relationship, a cultural conversation with a history of misunderstandings rooted in inequality and political bias (Denzin 1997).

Critical theory has thus raised questions, through its overall inspection of the grounds of secure knowledge, of the following:
- how academic and scientific disciplines may be subject to systematic bias;
- how this bias may be rooted in conceptions of gender and ethnocentric views of other cultures;
- how the history of disciplines is not necessarily a story of the neutral progress of knowledge of an independent object of interest.
In all there is serious doubt that academics can inhabit an ivory tower of intellectual freedom from society, history and culture.
In accounts of the history of archaeological thought it is not usual to connect critique and science in this way. I think however that it is necessary to do so to account for a set of tensions in current archaeology and at the heart of the concern about the politics of the discipline.

One tension is between innocence and scepticism. Innocent I term the fascination with the act of discovering lost times in the immediacy of the physical encounter with ruins and remains. This is not just the innocence of the freshman undergraduate drawn to archaeology by the fascination of discovering the past. It is a whole sector of the media focused upon a cultural tourism of times gone by, great discoveries of lost civilisations, investigations of great themes in human history, from hominid origins through to the relics of industrialisation. Perhaps not always innocent, it is certainly, in my view, naive in its belief in a direct route from the discovery of archaeological finds through to knowledge of the past. This innocence and naivety may be contrasted with the scepticism, implicit in what I have written about critique, that knowledge is ever value free.

There are those in archaeology and other humanities and social sciences uneasy with disciplinary change, the questioning or critique of orthodoxy, the renegotiation of disciplinary boundaries, the recycling of ideas, the necessity of learning new techniques and skills, the doubts raised by theorising how disciplines construct knowledge (Flannery 1982). In contrast are those who embrace all this, fervently pursuing Clarke’s critical self consciousness. This tension may be between the stability represented by self-contained scientific neutrality and the commitment of the cultural politician, locating knowledge in different political agendas (consider Yoffee and Sherratt 1993 and Hodder’s response (1994)).

Other related tensions, often unvoiced, are between the university academic who believes in academic neutrality, those authoring in a public media sector (writers, TV producers, educators, movie makers), and professional workers in cultural resource management who manage the material remains of the past. These are classic tensions between the research oriented academic and the popular author, between the interested amateur and the professional. At the heart of these tensions is the question to what extent archaeological knowledge can stand on its own, to what extent the remains of the past should be directed at an amateur public, serviced by responsible, neutral professionals.

This review of the explicit theory building around the history and shape of disciplines, can help account for the particular political issues in archaeology as represented in the scenarios with which I began. There are disputes about academic neutrality, about the role and responsibility of professionals, about the independence of archaeologists from broader cultural issues such as religion, spirituality, ownership and rights to the past.

To develop a deeper understanding as a basis for attempting some resolution of these problems like academic neutrality I must now introduce some of the cultural changes of the last thirty years, associated with ideas of a cultural shift to postmodernity.

Archaeology and the politics of postmodernity

It is clear that archaeology and anthropology are central to the cultural development of the advanced capitalist nation states of the nineteenth century. Political revolution (Britain in the seventeenth century, France and the United States at the end of the eighteenth) and its threat accompanied the forging of a new form of political unity through the industrial nation state (Hobsbawm 1990). A crucial factor in ideas of national identity was the imperialist and colonial experience of travel and other cultures (Pratt 1992). I have already made mention of the role of anthropology in confronting the industrial west with its alternative. Archaeology provided material evidence of folk roots of the new state polities. This has been one of the main cultural successes of archaeology – to provide the new nation states of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with histories and origin stories rooted in the material remains of the past (Díaz-Andreu and Champion 1996). Myths of ancestry were articulated in new national narratives, stories of belonging and common community. Both archaeology and anthropology provided specific symbols and evidences used to create exclusive and homogeneous conceptions of identity rooted in national traditions, conceptions of race, ethnicity and language. Moreover archaeology provided an extraordinary immediacy apparently accessible without academic training – finds which could be displayed to speak for themselves in the new museums, the cultural treasure houses of imperial power. Many archaeologies around the world continue to perform this role of providing material correlates for stories and myths of identity and belonging (Trigger 1984; Kohl and Fawcett 1995; Olivier and Coudart 1995; Meskell 1998).

Conceptions of modern identity are still dependent upon the idea of the nation state and upon the formation of nation states in the nineteenth century. But recent history clearly shows their instability. They often have no obvious cultural justification in geography, history, race, or ethnicity. Nation states are social constructions (Anderson 1991; Bhabha 1990). Growing out of the demise of old empires, nation states have frequently been connected with enlightenment notions of human rights and rational government (democracy and representation), relying on these to unify people around a common story of their national identity. Such unified history and culture have always failed to cope with diversity. The distinction between nation and nation state has frequently collapsed into contention, with ideas of self determination and freedom, identity and unity colliding with the suppression of diversity, and relying on domination and exclusion that override a genuine egalitarian pluralism (Chatterjee 1993).

This is a modern or modernist tension between enlightenment ideas of popular will and sovereignty, universal human rights and locally circumscribed nation states, each independent of similar polities on the basis of cultural identity and history (Turner 1990).

The tension has shifted emphasis in recent decades. Nations states now have less power and agency, which is in stark contrast to the ever-increasing influence of structures and movements of corporate and transnational capital. In a period of rapid decolonisation after the second world war this globalisation is about the transformation of imperial power into supra-national operations of capital, communications and culture. This postcolonial world is one of societies, including new nation states, that have escaped the control of the empires and ideological blocs of western and eastern Europe. An ideological unity is engineered through mass culture, the mass media, and mass consumption – a predominantly American culture. And the integrated resources of the global economy lie behind this (Curti and Chambers 1996; Featherstone, Lash and Robertson 1995; Featherstone 1990; Spybey 1996).
But with international capital, global telecommunications and world military order, the nation state continues to be a major structural feature of this postmodern scene. It remains a major focus of regional cultural identity. The postcolonial state is heavily and ironically dependent upon notions of the state and nation developed in Europe, and so too it is dependent upon the same sorts of ideological constructions of national identity developed through history, archaeology and anthropology (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). Hence a key tension or contradiction in globalisation is between the fluid free market between nations, epitomised in multinational and corporate capital and based upon ideologies of the free individual operating beyond boundaries of any individual polity, and ideologies of difference, ideologies of local identity. Here the nation, nation state and nationalism remain potent.

And here archaeology remains a vital cultural factor, in the context too of ideas of heritage. For the crucial cultural issue is that of the ways local communities engage with these processes of globalisation. And the ways they do compare with the ways colonised communities dealt with imperial colonial powers; the interpenetration of local and global cultural forces is a feature of modernity since at least the nineteenth century. It is not simply a one-way process of influence, control, dissemination and hegemony, with an American western homogenised culture taking over and supplanting local identity. It is not just top down dominance, but a complex interplay of hegemony, domination and empowerment. The key question or issue is the way external and internal forces interact to produce, reproduce and disseminate global culture within local communities. To be asked, is to what extent the global is being transformed by peripheral communities; to what extent, by appropriating strategies of representation, organisation and social change through access to global systems, are local communities and interest groups empowering themselves and influencing global systems.

Here then is a broad context for some of those issues on the archaeological agenda already illustrated. There is the part archaeology plays in the construction of national and cultural identities (Rowlands 1994). A key is an encounter with materiality and regional focus, the ruins of a local past, setting the homogenisation of processes like nationalism, colonisation and imperialism against the peculiarities of history and geography. This is about the relation between local pasts and those global methods, frameworks and master narratives which may suppress under a disciplinary and cultural uniformity the rich pluralism and multicultural tapestry of peoples and histories. So what is now termed ‘world archaeology’ (in relation to the mission of the World Archaeological Congress introduced at the beginning of this chapter), implies questions of whether genuine local pasts, implicit in local and distinct identities, are possible. Its focus on obdurate remains suggests the possibility of a material resistance to the ideologies of a homogeneous world, uniform in its accommodation to the commodity form and principles of the global market.

The grounds of dispute

This politics of archaeology can also be seen as a series of debates or disputes. Let me clarify.

The perceived importance of the material past has led to a tangle of issues surrounding preservation and conservation. This has been a significant area of legislative effort in heritage management. What should be preserved for posterity from development and simple destruction? It is fundamentally about value – what of the material past is valued most and on what grounds? (Carman 1996).

Questions of what should be preserved, how and for whom, lead immediately to questions of ownership and access. Stonehenge is a classic case of this – if the state owns Stonehenge in the name of the people, how are different interests and rights of access to be managed and negotiated? The repatriation of cultural goods and valuables also comes under this heading – should museum collections be dispersed to their places of origin and their supposed cultural owners, or are there grounds other than provenance upon which ownership may be decided?

There are disputes about academic neutrality. This is, as I have already indicated, a long running dispute in the humanities and social sciences about the possibility of value freedom. Can the academic archaeologist stand back from the past and present, claiming scholarly neutrality?

Closely connected is a question of pluralism (correlating with the issue of diversity and multiculturalism introduced in the previous section). Can there be multiple and commensurable claims on the material past? Does everyone have an equal stake in the remains of their past, or is it more appropriate that some should have access and rights and not others? Should Stonehenge be open to anyone and everyone? If not, who is to decide whose interests are to be heeded?

This issue of pluralism is also about authority. For example, do the claim and views of an amateur carry the same weight as those of an academic? Can there be more than one account of the archaeological past? More generally this is a question of who should represent the past. Who speaks for the past? Is it only the professional academic claiming scientific authority?

The authority and role of the academic, professional or intellectual may be argued to depend upon notions of neutrality. Professional independence may be associated with freedom from politics and therefore authority. But religion and spirituality hold competing claims on authority. So is archaeological science to be considered only a body of theory, in contrast to the fundamental spiritual truths of a religion? The material past is, as indicated, a vital ingredient of cultural identity. The possible question here is whose identity?

On these issues of science, religion and identity it matters what is said of the past, the precise way in which it is reconstructed or told. Clearly there are disputes about what happened in the past, but disputes which go beyond mere academic interest are clear candidates for the political in archaeology. Did the expansion of the Third Reich find precedent in the prehistoric and, according to some, archaeologically attested expansion of Aryan peoples in prehistory? Many have argued this is an incorrect reading of prehistory.
The growth of archaeology as a profession working in universities and government organisations, and tied to significant bodies of conservation legislation, has led to professional associations such as the Institute of Field Archaeologists in Britain and the Society for American Archaeology in the USA. In defining themselves and in codifying grounds of inclusion and exclusion, they have developed codes of practice frequently and explicitly based upon ideas of professional ethics. How should a field archaeologist deal with different demands of clients? How should a field archaeologist be trained? On the basis of what experience and qualifications should an archaeologist be accredited by a professional association? What are the rights of archaeological workers, their representation in the discipline? Some of these are obvious political issues. Others may appear more to do with professional practice, though I am going to contest this distinction below.

Some have argued that there is a marked disparity in the distribution of influence and authority in the world archaeological community, with archaeologists from the first world effectively exporting their theories, practices and frameworks abroad. Consider the question whether the origin of agriculture and animal domestication is equally significant in all societies, as is implied by many of the conventional textbooks of archaeology.

In all these areas of debate and dispute it is common to find that the politics of the discipline is held to be separate from its science, and from the past itself. Politics is seen as referring to what is done with the past. The political does not, this orthodoxy holds, include the past itself which just happened the way it did in its own present separate from ours. If the political is identified in archaeological thought, it is frequently seen as a source of undesirable bias or prejudice, at best to do with the application of knowledge to a social, cultural or political issue. The political is seen as to do with the context of scientific study.

Under this view I identify as follows the key concerns of conventional academic politics:
- Sovereignty, legality and border disputes:
over what intellectual territory does archaeological science hold sway?
what is considered right and wrong in archaeological practice?
what are the terms under which archaeology and other academic or cultural practices may encroach upon each other’s territory?
- Policing the boundaries of the discipline:
how to maintain archaeology’s integrity in the face of competing claims on its sphere of influence
- The rights, competencies and role of the academic, intellectual, professional, or ‘scientist’: what makes an archaeological scientist a good practitioner in the discipline.

Archaeological community

The last section ended with some issues at the heart of the definition of archaeological rights and responsibilities. Here I wish to build on this commentary about the organisation of groups of archaeological workers and approach the topic of archaeology and politics in a different way.

I do not see the politics of the discipline as about its social and cultural context at all. I think this notion of context creates problems in coming to a fair resolution of these disputes at the heart of archaeology’s politics. Instead I am going to consider what may be termed the political economy of the discipline of archaeology. In focusing upon archaeological communities, I will argue that archaeology is best seen as a mode of cultural or scientific production rather than scientific discovery, or an establishment of what happened in the past through material remains. It is not useful to think of the politics of archaeology being about the application or context of archaeological knowledge.

The archaeological site of dispute – legislating difference

Let me begin with a simple question – what happens on an archaeological site?

Let me explain the question with an example. At the moment I am part of a large international project excavating a protohistoric settlement in Sicily and surveying its region (http://www.stanford.edu/~mshanks). Several universities, government organisations, groups and individuals are involved from Sicily itself, northern Europe and the United States. There is a broad research design and some individual areas of interest, for example in regional economic organisation, in the cultural groups interacting in the mid first millennium BC, in the reception of richly interwoven historical landscapes in archaeological projects. We rely on different sources of funding to enable the project to happen. Sometimes the different interests work together efficiently, sometimes not, as we debate method, management structures, our different agendas. Is a traditional archaeological approach to culture history really compatible with the aims of others to study the negotiation of cultural identity? Is an excavation procedure based upon tight control of stratigraphy always to be preferred to a classical archaeological focus upon finds and structures? Is an ethnography of the project, locating its interests in a broader intellectual community and landscape, to be pursued, or should the site and the past be the focus?

These debates worked themselves out through the use of trowels and picks (the trowel the favourite tool of the stratigraphic afficionado), surveying instruments (the total station and GIS an ideal for detailed contextual information record), terminologies (orthodox Greek words for finds or more neutral terms?), lines of authority (who, ultimately, is to reconcile different interests?), rights of access (who can have access to material and information?), issues at the local superintendency of antiquities (conservation of the finds, permissions, negotiations with the forestry commission over the use of earth moving machinery), arrivals at the local airport (organising transport), photography (digital and conventional, of what and of whom, are the diggers themselves legitimate subjects for record?), recording systems (the design of a database which could encompass different approaches to the site and its finds), phone lines (ISDN lines and portable cellular phones offering remote access), water at the dig house (for diggers as well as lab and flotation equipment), getting liquid cash to Sicily, convincing the local commune that they are onto something good (providing a narrative with which they might identify), cultural differences between some of the locals and some of the excavation team (where to eat and drink and with whom in the local town), the intellectual boundaries of the project (how far should our critical self consciousness go?).

Where is the science in such a project? Where is the archaeology? At what is it directed? Of what does it consist? Do science and archaeology refer tightly to the work on site, shifting earth, bagging materials, processing them in a lab and on computer screen? Is the ethnography of a project, studying its participants and accounting for their interests not part of archaeology, something to do with the context of the archaeological study of the past?
And if so, what of the rest? Everything from permissions to funding to relations with the Sicilian town which so hospitably receives our interests. Is the task of organising efficient earth moving simply the context of doing the science of discovery? What of the experiences and practices which are seen not to belong to science, but which are part of the project?

I refer back now to that orthodox and basic insistence on the distinction between science and non-science, archaeology and not archaeology, seen here in various forms. This is politics – the permissions, the interest of the local minister of culture, the different local interest groups. This is heritage and identity – ideas of a Sicilian prehistory to be found in a conventional designation of culture historical archaeology, the Elimi culture of the mid first millennium BC. This is entertainment. This is interpretation for the community. These are archaeological subjects. These are the objects of archaeological inquiry.

I wish to take issue with these distinctions, with this sort of insistence upon distinguishing the scientific from the spiritual from the political from the personal. It is, I believe, part of a desire to keep science and society or politics apart, this notion of archaeology and its context. And with this desire I connect a radical separation of the technical and the social, the professional from the political, the past from the present. Also indeed the non-human from the human in that the tools and materials of the project are usually conceived as a means to an end, media, implements in the hands of archaeology’s agents or practitioners.

These distinctions are about value, it might be noted (Shanks 1992, 99-101). A potsherd may invoke an interest in ceramic petrology which is considered quite separate from the value the piece may have to the art market, or to a local antiquarian in a town in Sicily, or to a school child interested in its images of waterbirds. But the different interests are not commensurable, for archaeologists alone are held to speak for the remains of the past, representing them to the present’s epistemological interest in gaining reliable knowledge of the past.

And the introduction here of value reminds us that these distinctions are often about separating archaeology’s proper practice from distractions or irrelevant matters. What really matters, under this view, is that the project pulled through the summer, in spite of the political/cultural/logistical/practical difficulties. I do not see these as trivial interests or values, irrelevancies distracting us from the real past, from archaeological methods, ideas and narratives. Instead, I insist that without what is normally kept separate from the field science, there could be no field science. Workers need to be transported and fed. Permissions are needed. And, as is commonplace to any researcher, research simply would not happen without the grant applications and awards. All this experience that is a field project is the concrete life of science.

Building archaeological communities – the professional answer

What holds this Sicilian project together? Especially given all these splits and distinctions? It is a question of archaeology’s political economy – what makes a project work? To generalize, it can be asked, what holds archaeology’s communities together, makes them work? This is a classic question of political philosophy – the nature of social order.

The conventional answer is that order arises from the subject itself, the discipline of archaeology. Order lies in the disciplinary paradigms and practices. It is not that order of this sort arises from a common interest in the material past. For this would bring incompatible and potentially conflicting practices together — treasure hunting art collector with dispassionate scientist. Instead of interest, the very term discipline communicates the order and unity. Discipline includes accredited methods, systems of qualification for practitioners and codification of archaeology’s object. There are systems of entry and rules of belonging to the discipline. Discipline is thus also partly a moral order of duties and responsibilities, according to which one may be an archaeologist.
Power and normative behaviour are closely associated in disciplines. The edges particularly are policed to ensure the quality of what is taken for normal, accredited, practice and belief. Cranks and charlatans need to be kept out. Respectability needs to be ensured. When there is doubt, for example in contentious issues, there are systems of arbitration and appeal. These are located in a public sphere of disciplinary members, the community of archaeology. Reference may be made to peers of professionals or particular authorities for arbitration or judgement. Of course general debate also takes place in this same public sphere, through the systems of peer review and publication. The public sphere of a discipline is usually held in great value, considered to be the fundamental basis of the rational establishment and progress of knowledge. I also hope it is clear how notions of academic collegiality and freedom of speech fit into such a sketch of disciplinary community.

Building archaeological communities – the question of constitution

However, I propose that this conventional answer to the question of social order in archaeology – discipline – does not adequately answer the question of what holds everything together in a field project such as our’s in Sicily. For there are still emphasised the boundaries between what is archaeological and what is not, and for our purposes here, the distinction between matters appropriate to science and those appropriate to politics, between science and its context or application.

In this political economy of archaeology let me now introduce the concept of constitution. A constitution may lie behind the establishment of social or political order. A constitution determines who shall be a social subject, a social agent and empowered member of a society; it governs the distribution of competencies in a community, decides the rights and duties of subjects. Forms of representation are central to constitutional arrangements, according to which it is decided who may speak and for whom. In legal terms this is also a matter of the reliability of different kinds of speech and witnessing, being about to whom we listen and pay heed.

Again, the archaeological constitution is to do with the discipline and its regulation. Archaeologists are the empowered subjects, representing, or speaking on behalf of, usually, the past, through its testimony, the remains of the past. Archaeologists are obliged to do this fairly and without avoidable bias.

An immediate constitutional question is that of the strength or validity of the arrangement. What makes people believe in archaeology? What makes the archaeological constitution robust? Confidence may reside in the guarantees of quality built into the discipline as a profession – the systems of qualification and regulation. But these can only claim to guarantee a certain kind of relationship with the past on the part of archaeologists. This relationship is one that is argued to deliver the most secure knowledge of the past; it is built on epistemological links related to the reality of the past. It seems to me that we believe in archaeology because we believe that the past happened and that its evidence or testimony, the real and material remains of past times, may be fairly represented by an archaeologist working under this particular discipline.

I am going to question some of the assumptions made in this archaeological constitution, particularly the legal arrangement between the past, its material remains and their fair representation by archaeologists.

An historical interlude: modernity and the political economy of natural science
Archaeology shares its constitution with many other academic disciplines. Like other political constitutions, it took its present form some time ago as part of the enlightenment’s reassessment of people’s place in the world.

To illustrate and explain how science and politics come together and diverge, let me introduce Robert Boyle, seventeenth century chemist and natural philosopher, an acknowledged father of modern science. He conducted experiments on air, vacuums, combustion and respiration, developed a new theory of matter and researched various chemical elements. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer have written about his arguments for the empirical method in science, the method that is the basis of all modern scientific inquiry, archaeology included (Shapin and Shaffer 1985; Shapin 1994; I rely heavily on the reading of Bruno Latour 1993, 13-43).

Boyle was critical of the science, or rather ‘natural philosophy’ of his time. And instead of grounding his criticisms and new ideas in the traditional way, in logic, mathematics or rhetoric, Boyle adopted a different system of argument and inquiry. He argued that scientific experimentation, based upon direct experience, is the best way of acquiring factual knowledge of the world. A bird suffocates in a vacuum pump in a scientist’s laboratory. This is witnessed by the scientist and his gentlemen associates. It is held to display the existence of air. How is the fact to be disseminated and believed?

Boyle modelled his answer to this issue of reliability on a legal and religious system of witnessing: witnesses gathered at the scene of the event can attest to the existence of a fact, the matter of fact, even indeed if they do not know its true nature (air essential to respiration). Boyle and his colleagues abandoned the certainties of apodeictic reasoning through logic and mathematics in favour of direct experience, the testimony of witnesses, and opinion; he chose a method of argument that was held in contempt by the oldest scholastic tradition.

Juridical witnessing carries the danger of insecure testimony. But Boyle’s witnesses are not the fickle masses with their raving imaginations; they are gentlemen – independent of the state, credible, trustworthy, well-to-do. So experimental philosophy emerged partly through the purposeful reallocation of the conventions, codes and values of gentlemanly conduct and conversation into the domain of natural philosophy.

There is a crucial difference to the practice of courts: the nature and agency of the events, their significance and the witnesses. In experimental science trials were now to deal with affairs concerning the behaviour of inert materials and bodies – the world of natural phenomena. These are not of the human world, but they are endowed with meaning and indeed ‘will’ – through showing, signing, and scribbling on laboratory instruments before trustworthy witnesses. And though they do not have souls to lose through perjury, they are nevertheless the source of testimony even more reliable than that of mortals, to whom will is attributed but who lack the capacity to indicate phenomena in a reliable way. The bird suffocates in a vacuum and attests to a natural phenomenon. I will return to the relationship between people and things or non-humans.

This is also the problem of the relationship between direct experience and its report or representation. Proper science is seen as a culture which rejects reliance upon authority and others and seeks direct experience. But not everyone has a vacuum pump in the seventeenth century, a piece of laboratory equipment perhaps as advanced as a fusion reactor of today. And the juridical model of credibility and argument has a new mechanism for winning the support of one’s peers – the marshalling of the opinion of as many trustworthy ‘gentlemen’ as possible, whether this opinion is expressed directly, or through footnotes in a scientific paper.

The broader argument here is that in securing knowledge we rely upon others. This reliance is a moral relationship of trust; crucial to knowledge is knowing who or what to trust – knowledge of things depends upon knowledge of others. Hence Boyle’s translation of gentlemanly conduct into scientific practice. What we know of the chemistry of air, or atoms, or indeed the past irreducibly contains what we know of the people who speak for and about these things (just as what we know about people irreducibly depends upon what they say about the world). Essential therefore to the spread of science is machinery, the laboratory instruments capable of inscribing the witnessing, trust in the freedom of action and virtue of gentlemanly conduct, and a network or community of science ensuring the consistency of instrumentation and communication between its members.

Central to this experimental life is the conduct of the experimenter. For Boyle is not only creating a scientific discourse. He is creating a political discourse from which politics is to be excluded. Gentlemen proclaim the right to have an independent opinion, in a closed space, the laboratory, over which the state has no control. Reliability thus hinges on freedom – political freedom. This involves an absolute dichotomy between science as the production of knowledge of facts, and politics, the realm of state and sovereign.

Nevertheless, the empirical method is based upon a juridical and indeed political metaphor of representation, agency and competency. Machines and instruments in the laboratory or in the field produce costly and hard to reproduce facts, witnessed by only a few, and yet these facts are taken to be nature as it is, directly experienced, believed ultimately by the majority. The witnesses are believed to be reliable, fairly representing the facts to others. The key term uniting science and politics is representation. Consider two fundamental and homologous questions of science and politics. Who is speaking when the scientist speaks? Who speaks when the political representative speaks? It is proposed that this homology makes it possible to speak of the conjoined invention of scientific facts and modern citizenship, dependent as it is upon representation and in democracy, trust in the virtue of the political will of the majority.

This intimate connection between inquiry and politics is denied or found problematical, as I have tried to argue in the case of archaeological field science. It is as if the stability of knowledge of things requires the implicit relations of trust and issues of representation to become invisible, the politics of inquiry to be a problem or embarrassment. For Bruno Latour, Boyle’s arguments are archetypical of this parallel strategy or structure of modernity. On the one hand is the creation of extraordinary hybrids or translations, like Boyle’s joining of law court, moral virtue, the accoutrement of scientific laboratory, the facts of nature and its underlying reality. All in an experimental method which, of course, has been extraordinarily successful. On the other hand such hybrids are often fervently denied, being based upon a partitioning of experience and practice. Latour (1993, 5-8, 35-37) calls this the modern critical stance – a radical separation of science, society, politics and religion, the human world of people and culture divorced from the natural world of things.

Let me summarise and pull together the main points of this digression into the history of science:
- Scientific credibility, rooted in empirical and experimental method, has a moral history as well as an epistemological structure.
- The history of modern science is not about the emergence of ‘proper’ scientific practice out of prescientific superstition. This is not just the case of Boyle. Historical studies have repeatedly shown how the progress of science does not depend upon some force of truth operating in favour of better science; it is not about the achievement of closer epistemological approximations to truth or reality (Fuller 1997).
- We are encouraged to see scientific disciplines as communities and moral orders inseparable from the construction of knowledge. Indeed people and their politics/morality are the medium for the construction of knowledge. We should be suspicious of the sort of splits I have claimed are endemic to the politics of a discipline like archaeology: the separation, for example, of method from political significance or context.
- We are encouraged to consider science as an irreducible hybrid of heterogeneous cultural and natural elements. The corollary is that society too is so composed. Concepts applicable to both are representation and constitution.
- This all points towards scientific knowledge being understood as a social achievement. This is a performative model of reasoning and the building of knowledge.

Heterogeneous social engineering and political ecology

This digression was to illustrate the relevance of the concept of constitution in an analysis of the politics of the discipline of archaeology. What I have described as archaeology’s current constitution is only one limited schema of apportioning rights, responsibilities, competencies, agencies, and pertinences. For this is what constitutions do. And more: as a mode of constructing knowledge of the past, archaeology is rooted in a metaphysics of reality, past, present, subject, subjectivity, object, objectivity. For every constitution determines who counts, who, or what, is subject to the will, desire, scrutiny and use of its social agents. And on what basis: for example, complex notions of subjectivity and objectivity, or personal bias and distanced fair-mindedness, are considered important for judging the words and actions of one who is representing another.

This constitutional issue involves the past itself, which is represented, in its remains, by the archaeologist and is deemed subject to their competency and responsibility as an accredited member of the archaeological profession or community. Let me deal a little further with this political issue of representation.

Representation may be more or less direct. The strongest position in this political economy is often considered to be one where the role of representation is apparently minimised or absent, where emphasis is thrown upon the past itself. The ideal is thus to let the past speak for itself, an ideal found in those calls for a return to simple field practice, calls which regret the arrival of Clarke’s critical self consciousness. This throws suspicion on the activity of interpretation, on the representative, and refers us to the grounds upon which adequate representation may be considered to have been made. Whom do we believe when they talk of the ruined past? The matter is sharpened by the difficulty, indeed frequent unfeasibility, of corroborating witnesses, of questioning again the represented interest, the ruined past, because the past is partly or wholly destroyed in its excavation, in the act of questioning. We cannot pose the question again, reexcavate a site, so we must assess the trustworthiness of the archaeologist, the representative. Professional accreditation becomes all the more important.

It should be noted that such a disciplinary constitution involves apportioning rights to inanimate objects – the remains of the past. We are not used to thinking in terms of such political rights. Nor are we used to crediting agency to such things as instruments of examination and measurement like laboratory equipment, yet this is the implication of histories such as that of Boyle and the early days of the Royal Society. Seeing archaeology in terms of its constitution reconnects archaeologists and the past that is their interest. Anthropological and historical studies of science have shown again and again how it is so little about abstract method or epistemology. Every practicing scientist knows the importance of the committees, institutions and funding agencies. Alongside Latour’s familiar critical stance of science and its objects radically separated from a context of society, history, religion, and metaphysics we find networks of fundamentally political connection running through archaeological and other scientific projects. Like Boyle, they may connect laboratories with field locations with instruments, with new insights into real homologies between scientific and cultural practice. I am picking up here that point above, about the hybridity of Boyle’s scientific innovation. The hybridity of these networks of association, these social orders, makes my argument less about political economy and more an ecology of practices and knowledge. For the systems of translation that are archaeology may connect a trowel with a computer database with a debate about cultural ethnicity with a community’s aspiration to tap the affluence of a tourist trade, all as I described as our field project in Sicily. The political is not just about people, rights and relationships; it is about things too. This is the main thrust of Latour’s fascinating history of modernity, We Have Never Been Modern (1993).

So a discipline like archaeology is, I propose, a hybrid process of heterogeneous engineering, to borrow a phrase from the sociologist of technology John Law (1987). Archaeology may connect all sorts of heterogeneous things, ideas, aspirations, values, communities, subcultures, contexts (Shanks 1992). The things left of the past are translated through the cultural and political interests of the present. As Bruno Latour puts it (1993, 4): "it becomes impossible to understand brain peptides without hooking them up with a scientific community, instruments, practices – all impedimenta that bear very little resemblance to rules of method, theories and neurons".

Archaeology as cultural production

So how am I proposing to think of the politics of archaeology? It is an ecology of mobilizing resources, managing, organising, persuading. It is such practice (which developed from models originating only in the modern state) that defines the discipline. Archaeology is a hybrid practice and I think this is more useful and indeed more correct than seeing archaeology as beginning with method and an epistemological relationship between past and present.
So archaeologists do not happen upon or discover the past that may then become contentious or subject to some political wrangle. Archaeology is a process in which archaeologists, like many others, take up and make something of what is left of the past. Archaeology may be seen as a mode of cultural production (McGuire and Shanks 1996), moving from source materials or resources to the consumption of an end product such as a book, excavation report or museum exhibition. This does not necessarily question the validity of such work – it may indeed result in a real advance in our knowledge of the past. But such knowledge is always a social (and political) achievement.
I also note here, and not without some irony, the profound relevance of management studies to such political ecology. We are becoming used to discussions of the profession of archaeology and its management of the past (for example Cooper, Firth, Carman, and Wheatley 1995; McManamon and Hatton 2000). Some focus on archaeology’s politics. Most sustain the paradox of a scientific neutrality or expertise connected to the cultural hybridity that I have been concerned with in this chapter. But think again of matters such as organising projects, information flow, harnessing the creative energies of flexible teams of people, designing intelligent and reflexive record and accounting systems. Hybridity and heterogeneous engineering is the subject of the best of management thinking (consider, out of a vast selection, Peters 1992; 1999). It is about political mobilisation.

Constituting new communities

In approaching the topic of archaeology’s politics, I have argued in this chapter for the pertinence of a broad range of scholarship that is often categorised as science studies. Fundamentally such interdisciplinary study of the working of science is about that reflexivity in our work which David Clarke so valued in his view of the maturing discipline; it is about applying those same scientific standards in looking at archaeological practice as are mobilized in studying the past.

I end by drawing out some implications.

Archaeology precipitates political issues in which many archaeologists feel helpless or at a loss for words, other than those which assert their expertise in representing an image of what may have happened in the past. I see this as a political impasse that can be avoided. Archaeologists should wise up and not expect to disconnect archaeological method, however scientific we want it to be, from everything that allows it to happen the way it does. So ultimately there can be no escape from politics behind a stand for neutrality or correct scientific answer. The corollary – there is no knowledge for its own sake and archaeologists should maintain a deep scepticism towards all claims to knowledge, whatever their disciplinary origin. This gives to the archaeologist a responsibility for his/her actions far wider than assumed at present.
The hybrid unity I have described as the typical archaeological project makes archaeology comparable and commensurable with other social practices Archaeologists are in the same social and cultural milieu as those others who take up and work with the material remains of the past. Albeit under different constitutional arrangements – this is the difference, and simultaneously the grounds for comparing and connecting archaeology with other interests in the material past. So the boundaries of the discipline are arbitrary, though justifiable (on the grounds of archaeology’s constitution). The accredited norms of the discipline should be constantly reviewed.

My argument implies a crucial difference in the definition of archaeological community: who is held to belong, how one may join, and on what grounds. It is not now something definitively legislated by professional associations, though they may wish to have the monopoly. It is not just about adherence to a common method. Community is formed in the construction of cultural works. So our critical attention is drawn to the mechanisms of community building in academic and professional discourse. I note some key issues:
- How to establish freedom in archaeological communities – access to information, media and resources;
- Coping with pluralism – in this postcolonial context so important now to archaeology and its involvement in cultural identity;
- Border regions and boundaries – drawing lines between good and bad archaeological uses of the past, between archaeology and fundamentally different approaches to the past and material remains;
- The implications of new associative media – electronic and digital communities.

The archaeological production of knowledge is an art and science of assemblage (Shanks 1992; 1999, Chapter 1; Pearson and Shanks 2000). Again this is that hybrid practice of forging networks. This emphasises something that attracts many people to archaeology: it is a concrete sensuous human practice, often highly charged, focused upon the immediacy of real, but fragmentary and lost, pasts. Its relationships to (cultural) memory and identity are far from incidental. The emotive power of the material past, according to my argument here, is not something to be separated from some sort of neutral knowledge of what happened in the past. Elsewhere (for example 1992, 82-84) I have argued that this requires an embodiment of archaeological knowledges. This is something taken very seriously by many museums and heritage interpretations. The distinction between professional and popular or other uses of the past is thus to be questioned.

For me, what David Clarke’s critical self consciousness did was to blow archaeology apart, spreading it through a shifting disciplinary and cultural space. What is the archaeological project in these postcolonial times? In political terms I suggest we could do worse than look to the building of new communities, with a commitment to unceasing and open experiment around our assumptions, methods, media, and our ultimate aim of understanding the past in the present.

Further reading

Many works on the politics of archaeology have appeared in Routledge’s One World Archaeology series (previously published by Unwin Hyman), and edited by Peter Ucko. These gather many short papers (of varying quality) delivered at the World Archaeological Congress meetings. Relevant volumes coming from the first 1986 gathering mentioned in this chapter include those edited by Miller, Rowlands and Tilley (1989), Gathercole and Lowenthal (1989), Layton (1989a and 1989b), Shennan (1989). Another later book has been edited by Bond and Gilliam (1994). These review issues such as the importance of local pasts to contemporary notions of identity, and different interests in the archaeological past which sometimes deviate significantly from the academic. A broad theoretical survey dealing with contexts for this world archaeology programme has been edited by Ucko (1995).

Most work on the management of archaeology radically separates it from the politics of the discipline, preferring to stress that archaeology should be a professional, and so independent, practice. Nevertheless, Tunbridge and Ashworth (1996) have written an excellent general study of the political implications of heritage management. For the particular issue of the return or repatriation of artifacts see Greenfield (1996).

Various works by Grahame Clark through his career display a clear awareness of the cultural politics, or rather implications of archaeology from a distinctive and principled stand (see the chapter ‘Prehistory and today’ in his Archaeology and Society (originally 1939), then late works, The Identity of Man (1983), for example).

Peter Ucko’s account (1989) of the events surrounding WAC 1986 is invaluable as a case study in academic politics and its confusions. He deals with academic freedom and the role of the academic in society, as well as the personal politics of academic institutions. For another more abstract treatment of the same issue, and equally controversial, see the chapter on the politics of theory in Social Theory and Archaeology, my book written with Tilley (1987). This was followed by a programmatic statement in the journal Norwegian Archaeological Review (Shanks and Tilley 1989), with a discussion which includes a clear argument for neutrality and science from Colin Renfrew (1989). My understanding of the way disciplines work was changed enormously through encounter with the work of Bruno Latour; see especially his Science in Action (1987). He is at the forefront of studies of science which focus on the micropolitics of the construction of knowledge.

For critical theory and archaeology one should definitely examine Mark Leone’s pioneering and well-conceived position in American historical archaeology. (1987; Leone and Preucel 1992).

The debate about relativism, science and value freedom and whether it is feasible to have different, perhaps contradictory and incommensurable accounts of the past, is reviewed in an article by the Lampeter Archaeology Workshop, and in the ensuing, sometimes heated, debate in the journal Archaeological Dialogues (1997). Different positions can be found articulated by Trigger (1989) and Binford (1987). The issue of alternative pasts (to those constructed in mainstream academia) is also tackled by Schmidt and Patterson’s edited volume (1995), and in the Annapolis project (Leone, Mullins, Creveling, Hurst, Jackson-Nash, Jones, Kaiser, Logan, and Warner 1995). For a more academic treatment of the question of archaeology’s agendas, see the collection edited by Yoffeee and Sherratt (1993).

Nationalism and archaeology has received a great deal of attention since the 1980s. Edited books are by Atkinson, Banks and O’Sullivan (1996), Kohl and Fawcett (1995) and Díaz-Andreu and Champion (1996): these include a diverse range of views illustrating many of the positions outlined in this chapter. Meskell’s edited collection (1998) is particularly interesting, with its explicit political focus.

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