Archaeology and the Post-Modern Novel

The other day, while working at the Isthmia excavation house in Greece, I started to realize the parallel between archaeological work and post-modern fiction.

To be clear, I’m not especially familiar (nor entirely comfortable) with any kind of canonical definition of post-modern literature. That said, there are certain unavoidable parallels. 

As any number of scholars have observed, archaeology may be the quintessential modern discipline. Archaeological methods and practices involves putting things in order, then deploying these neatly organized objects as evidence for the past. This process usually involves standardizing information recorded during excavation or field survey in an effort to mitigate (or interpret?) records produced during fieldwork. With the introduction of digital tools, archaeologists now often standardize their observations in the field. Historically, however, archaeologists recorded notebooks in which they attempted to describe their work and provide narrative context for finds, structures, and changes in soil. Ideally, these notebooks feature consistent descriptions, but practically they often demonstrate the same diversity of voices, styles, experience, and aptitudes as the archaeologists who wrote them. 

Thus, notebooks often create space for unreliable narrators whose descriptions of their work and what they saw reflect as much who they are (or, rather, were) as individuals as any kind of analytical account of their trench, survey unit, or context. This is especially true for excavations where emphasis on methods and recording was more casual. In these cases, the individual character of the excavators becomes more apparent and the gap between what they did, what they saw, and what they recorded becomes more intriguing.

At best, the perspective of such unreliable narrators requires a significant tolerance for ambiguity in anyone reading (much less trying to use) their work. In some fields, this could be troubling, and it often runs against the dominant current of scientific practice, at least in a narrow definition of this concept that imagines rigorous methods marginalizing ambiguous information and emphasizing knowledge produced by more easily systematized “data.” Archaeology produces suggestive, fragmentary, and ambiguous data at a considerable scale. 

Much like reading a post-modern novel where story and characters, much less plot, are furtive, archaeological knowledge is shadowy, hidden, ambiguous, and fragmented.