While my purpose in this section is to explore the notion of ‘the field,’ I will also discuss the concept of ‘data,’ as they have been generally articulated in archaeological thinking over the last few decades. I am interested in contextualizing how these concepts relate to a very modernist archaeological epistemology. Therefore how archaeologists portray their practice in relation to the contexts of production is an important place to start. For example, a deeply embedded epistemological scheme in archaeology, the notion of the ‘field’ (as in ‘fieldwork’) is conventionally counterpoised to the supposed contexts of knowledge production, whether laboratory, archive, or study (here refer to: Lucas 2001b, 10-14; Berggren and Hodder 2003, 427-428; regarding gender, Gero 1994; in the context of anthropology, Gupta and Ferguson 1997). In what follows of this section I argue that at the basis of such separations is a commitment to that (most) fundamental divide, the ‘Great Divide’ of modernism, between ideas and things.

The term ‘field archaeology,’ according to O.G.S. Crawford, was coined by Dr Williams-Freeman who derived it from ‘field naturalist, which was used to distinguish those who studied plants and other living things alive and in the open air as contrasted with those who studied them in museums’ (Crawford 1953, 36). For Williams-Freeman, the field archaeologist, to be differentiated from the excavator, was ‘one who walks over the country observing and recording the remains of the past that are visible on the surface or are indicated by superficial remains such as potsherds, flints, soil-discolouration or the growth of crops’ (Crawford 1953, 36). The field archaeologist was an archaeographer, one who documents the ancient features of the countryside in the tradition of Aubrey, Colt-Hoare, and Stukeley (the latter two were also excavators). For Crawford, field archaeology was a specialty that ‘gradually became emancipated from the bookman’s spell, and developed a technique of its own’ (1953, 36). The field archaeologist found, observed and recorded ‘his’ own sites and things. These are activities that, as Crawford emphasized, ‘could not have been made if someone had not once left his house or study’ (1953, 42). This very separation between the things of the past out there and ideas in here, between science and humanism, has a long tradition in archaeology.

Perhaps Mortimer Wheeler articulates this classic division between ideas and things best when he states ‘that the preoccupying study of language is rarely in practice compatible in one and the same individual with the scientific, analytic study of phenomena as they present themselves in the earth’ (1961, 238-239; emphasis in original). While ‘Little Johnnie Head-in-the-Air’ represents a ‘particular class of humanist’ the field archaeologist gets ‘down to earth and studies the stuff of which civilizations are composed, or out of which civilizations have grown’ (Wheeler, 1961, 239). Here we explicitly confront echoes of the modernist scheme of the material world separated from language which the field | museum/home/study or the data | explanation/interpretation distinctions overlay. For Wheeler, the archaeologist was ‘primarily a fact-finder, but his facts are the material records of human achievement’ (Ibid, 228; my emphasis). ‘His’ secondary task was that of a humanist. Wheeler’s ‘field,’ like Crawford’s, was the locus of fact-finding, an activity properly undertaken through objective scientific method. The archetypical notion of the field as the locus of data collection is one that comes across as very military, masculinist, and, in Wheeler’s case, colonialist in character (Chadha 2002).

Indeed, the scheme of the field separated from laboratories, archives (including museums) or studies is so pervasive and fundamental, that it is to be found in the very definition of archaeology. For example, the authors of the popular introductory textbook Archaeology. Theories, methods, and practice, define archaeology as ‘both a physical activity out in the field, and an intellectual pursuit in the study or laboratory’ (Renfrew and Bahn 2000, 11). Marking the boundaries of archaeological knowledge production, this scheme is often reproduced in the language of popular field manuals (e.g. Collins and Molyneaux 2003; Drewett 1999; Ewen 2003; Roskams 2001; Wheeler 1961). In A complete manual of field archaeology, Martha Joukowsky states:

Archaeological investigations require a great deal of both outdoor and indoor work. Outdoor work consists primarily of surveying, pre-excavation exploration, and the excavation process itself: indoor work consists of cataloging, artifact analysis, drafting, and the preparation of the results for publication (1980, 7-8).

Here recast as ‘indoor’ verses ‘outdoor,’ the separation of the field from laboratories, archives, and studies is tied up with the almost standard and now heavily interrogated separation of data and interpretation (e.g. Andrews, Barrett, and Lewis 2000; Hodder 1999; Lucas 2001b; Thomas 2004a)—so that if the data are the what, then the field is the where.

This fundamental separation has provided a convenient, often taken-for-granted, frame of reference for a number of other divisions within the discipline and in many ways these added tensions have helped to perpetuate the separation of the field from laboratories, archives and studies. One such division is that of gender. The masculinist character of the field has now been dealt with in some detail (e.g. Gero 1985; 1994; Joyce 2002, 18-26; cf. Lucas 2001b, 7-8).

Joan Gero in accessing the field as a masculinist domain of the strong, active, exploratory, rugged archaeologist (the Wheeler archetype) contrary to the female archaeologist found secluded in the ‘base-camp laboratory or museum’ (1985, 344) compared both field and non-field based research by both males and females to determine whether a gender imbalance existed across this divide. To be sure, her findings revealed a discrepancy. She determined that a higher percentage of males focused on field-based research while the majority of women tended to work upon non-field related issues (1985, 346-347). For Gero, this imbalance is made all the more dramatic in the context of North American archaeology where the field is treated as the authentic locus of archaeological (and often scientific) work (1994, 38).

Certainly for many, such notions of the field may now seem overly anachronistic and yet some have argued that this archetype is perpetuated through what are argued to be military metaphors of fieldwork. In The Languages of Archaeology Rosemary Joyce publishes an e-mail dialogue between herself and Robert Preucel where they argue that the military overtones of fieldwork contribute to it being gendered as male (2002, 18-19). For them, the terminology often used to portray fieldwork through metaphors such as ‘campaign,’ ‘reconnaissance,’ ‘tactics,’ and ‘strategies’ evokes notions of the archaeologist as an efficient and well-disciplined male. This archetype, therefore, spills over into the divisions of labor with regard to social position (Berggen and Hodder 2003) and race (Chadha 2002; Sheppard 2003). In order to counter the archetype of the military, masculine (not to mention Western Anglo-Saxon) field, Joyce and Preucel argue that we should to switch to more agricultural metaphors of fieldwork.

Let it suffice to say that gender, social position, and race are certainly factors in discrepancies of knowledge production in archaeology and that the Western masculinist archetypical figure of the fieldworker and the field as the authentic locus of archaeological work only aggravates the perpetuation of any separation between the field and any supposed contexts of knowledge production (Gero 1994; 1996). Nonetheless, I would at this point emphasize that to simply change the metaphors we use to relate field practice will not go nearly far enough. This is because military design, innovation, instruments, and knowledge (intimately connected with the white, Anglo-Saxon, aristocratic male) are linked to so many aspects of what we do in ‘the field.’ Any effort to re-establish our understandings of fieldwork must expose (among others) the military and aristocratic connections, behind everything from media, instruments, and innovation, to knowledge, skills, and discipline that underlie archaeological field practice. This endeavor will comprise a critical aspect of Chapters 2 and 3.

Certainly, the field | laboratories, archives, studies divide is embedded in so much archaeological thought that it is often taken-for-granted. Furthermore, it is representative of more pervasive modernist values regarding our relationship to the material world and therefore extends into other ‘field’ sciences. In contemporary Mediterranean regional survey this separation of the contexts of production is important to creating an objective distance and thus maintaining the radical gap between the material world and discourse (in a Foucauldian sense). Indeed, the pervasive nature of this separation can be connected with the tensions between the field and the cabinet or museum, which are rooted in the very history of the modernism and the rise of the discipline (Schnapp 1996; Thomas 2004). This history will be dealt with in Chapter 2. All in all, this dualist scheme should be regarded as a product of modernist thought and therefore an over-simplification of what occurs in archaeological practice. I will return to this point throughout this chapter. Yet, prior to moving on, a brief definition of ‘modernism’ and the adjective ‘modernist’ is warranted.

In this dissertation modernism refers to the firm separation of society, culture or moderns from things, nature or the ancients. In this rather circumscribed sense, modernism, as a particular way of thinking and acting in the world, first purifies these entities into two separate and often opposed categories and then grants this dualist conception of the world an ontological status. Modernist thought in archaeology manifests itself in the peculiar way that archaeologists either speak about ‘objects’ or the ‘past’ as if they were ostensibly independent of and separate from the practitioner, or conceive of them as discourses which are socially constructed now in the present and as such simply act as a seemingly blank canvas for contemporary socio-political relations. Whereas the former would be conceived of as blatantly modern, the latter would be regarded as unquestionably postmodern. Yet both stances disarm the world of things, the environment of nature or the realm of the past and make them the dominions of humans now. This broad logic of demarcation and division where humans stand independently of the world around them is modernism (refer to Latour 1993, 10-15). In the next section I wish to focus in on how these modernist tensions are manifest in the epistemology posited by the tradition of regional surface survey in the Mediterranean and specifically Greece beginning with the University of Minnesota Messenia Expedition.

Return to Contemporary field practice, the interpretive turn, and symmetrical archaeology

Forward to Contemporary survey practice

Table of Contents

Multiple fields and archaeological practice Home

---

Forum Home  -  Site Home  -  Find Pages: