25 Grand Challenges for Archaeology - But for Which Archaeologists?

A story started to circulate late this week heralding a the release of survey results outlining "25 Grand Challenges for Archaeology". The initiative, led by senior researchers in both academia and CRM, was published in the most recent issues of American Antiquity and PNAS (Peter Peregrine, one of the authors, was also kind enough to post pdfs on his page, allowing even those without institutional affiliation to read the study). My commentary is built primarily from the AA article.

Some very useful discussion is already happening on other blogs (here and here) and got me to read the study a bit more closely and think about the themes the authors identified. I posted Michael E. Smith's blog response (the second link above) to my Facebook page along with the commentary that the list left me feeling a little "ho-hum". What followed was a lively discussion that helped me tease out my lack-luster response to the study, which I present here.The items set out in the list are "big" themes, and while I think that it is very useful to set out these grand challenges, I didn't feel very excited after reading it. While my level of enthusiasm doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of things, I do think that if broad sectors of archaeologists don't get fired up by these suggestions, then neither will the general public, who we need on our side. My critique of the study centers around two themes (participation and content) that I am hopeful will be addressed by the authors in greater detail, perhaps in later publications.

First, the authors of the study were quite concerned about the overrepresentation of older participants in the survey (or the lack of young and student archaeologist, as they describe it). It concerns me as well. An informal survey of my networks (which are primarily populated with early-career and student archaeologists) left a lot of us scratching our heads about how the survey was distributed, because we don't remember ever receiving notice of it. In my case, I was also starting a full-time job around the time that it went out, which may explain some amnesia, but it is worrisome that so many people in the under-represented age demographic don't remember receiving the survey.

The authors don't go into great detail concerning their research methods in the AA article, but I think it's important to look at who led the study and the report in this regard. The demographic that responded in greatest numbers seem to me to be similar to the authors themselves, suggesting that informal networks may have played a big role in getting people to respond. That makes it problematic, then, that 11 out of 14 authors are male, that they are all senior in their fields, and they are all white. As anyone who has attended a professional meeting in the last few years can tell you, the face of archaeology (in the US at least) is changing. Women are taking over, and people of color are more numerous, though still underrepresented. Finally, though Canadian, European, and UK societies were included in the survey, the respondents were overwhelmingly from the US. What languages were the survey distributed in, and was there any effort to include the international members of North American professional societies, or societies located in the Global South?

Second, the authors "explicitly excluded responses to the survey that addressed 'disciplinary challenges with respect to the practice of archaeology, such as changes in financial and legal frameworks'" (Kintigh et al. 2014:6-7). I think this is a missed opportunity. As my colleagues indicated during informal discussions, the decreasing excitement for archaeology in the face of "Ancient Aliens", "Diggers", or lawmakers' outright hostility to archaeology, is a real issue that needs to be addressed. The types of "big" questions proposed in the article come off as dry and unexciting to most people not directly engaged in that research. While I think there are ways to successfully convey what people do under each of those headings for a general audience, they were framed in such a way as to not promote much conversation outside of archaeology. 

Ultimately, the topics heralded in the report seem likely to further the insularism of so much of archaeology these days by emphasizing what archaeologists can discover about the past, without really emphasizing they ways in which we can contribute to current debates outside of the discipline (though there are some exceptions to this). Given the work I do, I was surprised to see how little attention was given to the valid research questions that accompany the politics and social context of archaeological inquiry (nothing about working with contemporary people, or our contributions to discourses surrounding heritage, or the political sphere that our work often enters). I realize that the authors had limitations and certain goals, but the themes they emphasize serve to obscure the excitement that we feel for our discipline and that we so desperately need to convey to other people.

So, what next? I think we need to encourage informal and formal discussion of these topics among the demographics that were underrepresented in the original study, and then move that to a more formalized response. There's momentum building for an ad hoc meeting in Austin to be held Friday night over a few beers, in typical archaeological fashion. If you're interested, drop me a line, or check back here as we get closer to the meetings.

The "25 Grand Challenges for Archaeology" may not result in more research on those topics, but it will at least get us all thinking more critically and publicly about where we see the discipline going, and that's a useful result in and of itself.

UPDATE (1/27/14): The study authors published the raw data from the responses, including the survey they used and the 40% of responses that addressed the "excluded" topics, on The Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR). You need to set up an account to download it, but it's free. The responses are quite interesting (some made me chuckle), and it gives you an idea of the kind of synthesis work that was required.

Show Us Your Ink!

In the way that many of the best(?) ideas do, #archaeologytattoos was born late one night when a few of us were chatting on Twitter.

We know you have them, and this is a chance to show them off!

Send me an email with a picture of your design - the information you share is up to you!

Things we'd love to know:

• Who are you? Do you blog or tweet? Where do you live? What kind of archaeology do you do?
• What inspired the design? We'd love to know not just the meaning of the image but the reason for having it permanently added to your body, too!
• Who did the work? A work of art deserves credit to the artist, so please let us know who did the design and needle work. Recommendations for great artists are appreciated!

I'll collect submissions as they come in and prepare a post when we have a nice bunch, maybe shooting for then end of January? For those of you going to the SAAs in Austin, the good news is that the weather should be warm enough for us to show some of these off in person!

#AcWriMo Brought Me Back For More

This was my second year participating in the annual #AcWriMo - Academic Writing Month. You can read more about the concept here. There's a lively online community of people participating, commenting, and sharing strategies, and as you can tell by the hashtag, much of this is done on Twitter. There's also a massive GoogleDoc spreadsheet where everyone declares their goals for the month and reports on their daily achievements. I think this year we had around 700 people declare their intent to participate. This type of constant, but slightly anonymous, accountability offered by the spreadsheet seems to work really well for me.

Last year's #AcWriMo was incredibly productive for me, as it got me on track with consistent writing and built some habits that allowed me to write a complete, but very rough draft of my dissertation in about three months. The most critical thing about #AcWriMo for me last year was finding out first-hand the importance of daily writing. It's not just a matter of slowly chipping away at a big project through steady work, but daily writing also builds momentum, and over time you are able to write more and more.

Last year I also discovered the beautiful software that is Scrivener, which I now swear by for writing anything longer than the shortest conference paper, and Skim, a FREE PDF annotation software that lets you mark up even un-OCRed documents. Added to Papers, for bibliography and digital library management, and these are the three programs I run constantly. People clued me into a host of other apps for Mac, most of which are free or run online and which boost productivity significantly. When I really want to crank out work I run FocusBooster (a free pomodoro app) and give myself some low background noise from Coffitivity. It's a blissful, productive bubble. I should also give a shout-out to the PhDometer, which has the benefit of counting total words written, not just the words you keep, which is what Scrivener or Word do. The PhDometer is a more reflection of the creation and editorial process involved in (particularly) academic writing.

Last year was so productive, and helped me develop some really great writing habits, so it was really a no-brainer to jump in again for this year's run. I even got tapped to help with the organization this time around. I'll be back with a post in the next few days reflecting on how this year's month went for me.

Blogging Archaeology Carnival Month 1: Why I Haven't Blogged

This post is a response to Doug's call for a blogging carnival in the lead-up to the 2014 meeting of the SAAs in Austin, TX this April. I'm adding my voice to many other archaeologists who blog to answer the questions Doug has set out for us this month. Briefly, he asks:

• Why blogging? – Why did you, or if it was a group- the group, start a blog?
• Why are you still blogging?
• Why have you stopped blogging? 

The most pertinent of these questions for me are the first and the third. As to why I started: I began this blog shortly before embarking on my year of dissertation research in Ecuador. I wanted a way to stay in touch with people from home, and my parents wanted a way of keeping tabs on their only child and granddaughter. Because internet access was limited, blogging was actually a good way of communicating with people - instead of writing or responding to numerous emails, I could craft a blog post, throw it up when I could log on, and then every one was on the same page. It was also a good exercise in working through some of the things I went through that were tangential to the archaeology but still a critical part of the experience, like living in a foreign country for an extended period of time and parenting a toddler. The blog was useful after I left the field as well. I, as well as some friends, have used my entries in classes to give students an idea of the experience of conducting fieldwork, and I used some of my entries as the bases for various dissertation chapters.

Since I returned from the field in May of 2010 I've posted five times, the last of which was over two years ago. I guess that means I have officially stopped blogging. Don't get me wrong, though, I'd love to blog more. So, why don't I? The answers to this question are varied. Perhaps the easiest answer is that I started this blog to document my experiences in the field, and that was a finite period of time that is now over. Without that adventure the impulse to blog has diminished.

Since my heyday of blogging my life has also undergone a number of changes. The husband I write about now is a different one than the one I wrote about when I was in Ecuador. Baby Girl is now officially Little Miss, and she needs different things from me. I also started a full-time job in May of 2012, and it was a bit of a shock to the system to go from a grad student schedule to a 9-5 one. Meanwhile, I'm trying to finish writing my dissertation in my free time. None of those things prevent me from blogging, but they got in the way in the past, and got me out of the habit.

The job I have now requires me to be the social media liaison for issues we deal with, and sometimes I just don't have anything left over at the end of a day to reflect on in a personal space. I also worry about people conflating my personal views on an issue with the official views of my organization, and because I am passionate about the work we do, I have definite, personal, opinions on a lot of those same topics.

Ultimately, though, I think I've struggled with finding my voice - feeling that I have enough authority about any given topic to write a whole post about it. I think it's related to the impostor syndrome, and a by-product of my graduate training and all the road bumps I've run into trying to wrap up my dissertation. But you know what? That's bullshit. I pontificate on Twitter or Facebook,  and I jump into cyber-debates and engage with colleagues face-to-face.

So, here's my promise to myself: I'm going to party with the rest of you on this #blogarch carnival, and give this thing another whirl. Besides, I went through all that trouble to compose this kick-ass background photo, and it would be a shame to waste it.

No Anthropology in Florida?

In a statement that's gotten a fair bit of press, at least on my Facebook news feed, Florida governor Rick Scott advocated for a change in the focus of higher education funding away from subjects in the humanities and social sciences and towards those in the STEM fields - science, technology, engineering, mathematics. It's part of his plan to develop job skills in students in Florida, which of course sounds like a good thing, but really isn't that simple.


The reason he's getting so much attention, at least from my Feed, is because he specifically selected anthropology as an example of a 'worthless' major. As you can imagine there was the expected level of outrage, a letter issued by the American Anthropological Association, and general slagging off of the governor for his position. I will be one of the first advocates for the critical thinking skills that can be gained from an anthropology major, not to mention the exposure to other belief systems and ways of life. I have to ask myself, though, why did he choose anthropology to pick on?


This article I read recently may provide the answer. John Hawks, Associate Professor of Anthropology at UW-Madison, argues, among several points, that anthropology really does a poor job of engaging with and communicating our research to the public. He sees this reflected in the overall piss-poor job prospects for graduate students in anthropology, compared to other fields such as sociology or geography. Essentially, anthropology isn't creating those ties and opportunities outside of academia that are necessary to justify their existence. This isn't a far cry from the argument made by Dr. Jeremy Sabloff in his Distinguished Lecture at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting in 2010 (note that he subtitled his talk with 'We Urgently Need Anthropological Public Intellectuals').


So, calls are coming from every direction, and some people are responding, but not necessarily with the wholesale change that may be required, and certainly not at the institutional level where a lot of the change needs to happen. Dishearteningly few anthropology programs in the States conduct community engagement programs or service learning, and this is particularly true of larger universities, those R1s, where the focus is still on 'pure' research and peer publications for the tenure process, rather than the ability to speak to the general public.


It's odd, though, that Gov. Scott should pick on anthropology in Florida. The Florida Public Archaeology Network is a dynamic and vibrant example of community outreach, teaching skills, providing employment, and showing just what archaeology (and by extension anthropology) can do. Of course, if you are a cynic like me, you see Gov. Scott's call for what it is - less funding for those disciplines that broaden minds and might contribute to a more liberal voting base.

Revive, Redesign, Reengage

So, if you scroll down just a bit, you'll notice that I haven't updated this blog in over a year. There's a reason for that - well, a lot of them, but the main reason is that the blog, in its previous incarnation, had served its purpose. I was done with fieldwork, my family had been able to follow what I was up to, and I no longer had the 'place excitement' of being in Ecuador to drive my posts.


So, I'd outgrown the old format, but that doesn't mean I don't have things that drive me now that I'm back at the University. They're just different things. In the last year I've engaged more with pedagogy withing archaeology, and anthropology more broadly, and as I go on the job market this year I'm thinking about how structural decisions at institutions impact both education and careers in academia. I am also, in part through my teaching, engaging with public uses and misuses of archaeological and anthropological ideas and data. 


So, rather than a travelogue, when you come here you can expect to find a mix of my thoughts on teaching and scholarship, responses to popular news articles, and the occasional dose of moaning about dissertation writing and the job market. I hope my posts keep you interested, and maybe provoke a deep thought or two.

Where I've Been

I found something today that perfectly demonstrates the love/hate relationship that I and many other grad students have with our dissertations:

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd080910s.gif

Particularly because I was so eager to get home, and kind of tired of Ecuador after a year, it's been difficult for me to return mentally to that place to think about the data I collected.

Fortunately I had a great lunch with an old friend last week who has kicked me back into gear, and now I'm actually excited to work on my dissertation! I'm currently working with another colleague to get a session together for the 2011 Society for American Archaeology Annual Meeting, which means I need to come up with a paper to present. I've also decided to go ahead and try to beat the Mr. to the finish line of the dissertation writing experience. Maybe we can get there together and put this grad-student life behind us!