CHAT Conference in Patras, Part 2

If you’re a reader of my blog then you already know that I spent last week at the 20th annual CHAT conference in Patras, Greece. As I suggested yesterday, Patras was a nice choice of sites for CHAT because it wore its historic place in the global economy so visibly (and, I might add, rather pleasantly, at least in the city center). Check out the program here.

I learned a good bit from the papers and conversations at the conference. In my post today, I’d like to highlight some aspects of the conference that made the greatest impact on me (which isn’t to say that they were necessarily the most impactful or even the most significant conversations that we had).

1. Ethics. One of the most compelling aspect of the conference was that the pervasive attention to ethics in the panels and papers. While I think ethics represents the most pressing matter in archaeology today, ethical questions saturate the archaeology of the modern period and contemporary sites. Some ethical considerations are obvious and range from how to document “active sites” in the field, matters of consent, responsibilities toward descendent communities, and our obligations to our colleagues in our field. In other situations, ethical responsibilities shape our disciplinary priorities with many of the classic area of historical archaeology taking on an increasingly ethical cast. If the archaeology of capitalism, colonialism, nationalism, race, and gender   were ever ethically neutral pursuits, contemporary practice insists that we foreground ethical considerations in our treatment of these areas and demonstrate explicitly how our approaches to these topics create new ways to understand social, economic, and political relationships.

I was intrigued and invigorated by the fearlessness of many of the presenters at the conference. Their willingness to tackle difficult ethical decisions (for example, how do we document spaces of confinement, places associated with torture, and unsafe and unjust working conditions without endangering workers, violating the privacy of already vulnerable groups, or alienating the present from the past in ways that make experiences incomprehensible) created a sense of urgency, immediacy, and significance to the work presented.

2. Ethnography. For an archaeological conference, there was a good bit of talk about ethnography. I was intrigued. On the one hand, it is hard to deny the importance of ethnography (usually through collaborations with anthropologist) in our field. It reinforces our efforts to foreground the human aspect of archaeological work by connecting explicit with individuals and communities through ethnographic practices. It also produces often productive tensions between objects and the various ways that we talk about objects. 

On the other hand, archaeology is not ethnography and even archaeology of the contemporary (and modern) world is not ethnographic. Not only are our disciplinary commitments different, but our disciplinary practices are as well. In fact, our work often presupposes that objects can tell stories without the need for contextualizing narratives. This confidence in objects not only allows us to use them to understand the past, but also enables them to create counter narratives in the present. 

The emphasis on ethnography at the conference was fine, but I worried at times that it might start to overshadow the role that archaeology can and does play that foregrounding objects and allowing humans to drift into the background (even just for a moment). This kind of “post-human” understanding of the world, especially one buffeted by the unavoidable signs of global climate change, should never be the ONLY way to see the world, but it can be a valuable reminder that world works without us.

3. Migrants and Movement. I sometimes feel like the conversation about migrants and movement in contemporary archaeology by Mediterranean archaeologists has become a kind of sidelight that is almost as valuable for the virtue signaling it allows as the knowledge it produces. Perhaps this view is too cynical (in fact, I know it is).

That said, the papers at CHAT that engaged with migrants and movement in the Mediterranean were sophisticated and thoughtful. In many ways, they considered how the traces left by the regimes designed to control the movement of individuals and the movements of individuals themselves create landscapes that stress the agency both of the state and migrants themselves. Foregrounding agency, of course, pushes us to also foreground ethics (as if we needed this additional nudge).

4. Creative Approaches. Among the most rewarding aspects of the conference was the short film session that showcased the potential of film as a medium not only for engaging with the work of archaeology in new ways, but also celebrating things and places. Lara Band’s film, Rubbing the Ungraspable to Burst, focused on the elusive materiality of helium through a recurring clip of a helium balloon dancing just above a ballroom floor. Irini Gratsia and Eleftheria Eleftheraki’s documentary, Buildings Are Like Friends, celebrated efforts of the Monumenta project to document Athens pre-war modern architecture. This short documentary looked at buildings both architecturally and within their social context — through informal interviews and crowd sourced data collection. Finally, Lucy Carr-McClave, A Small Document of Archaeology, considered archaeological practice through a sustained focus on the hands of archaeologists as they both did their work and talked about their craft.

These very different short films foregrounded the visual aspects of archaeological thinking by interrogating both practice and materiality. 

5. Conviviality and Inclusion. Finally, we started a thoughtful and hopefully ongoing discussion about how to make CHAT more inclusive, more accessible, and more diverse. This isn’t necessarily an easy thing because some of what makes CHAT so special is the long history of collegiality and friendship among the core participants. More than that, it is unapologetically a face-to-face conference and travel is expensive. 

That said, a roundtable conversation on the first day of the conference gave us some space to consider how we might expand the influence and impact of CHAT over the next 20 years.