Heritage Interpreters and Reflexivity

Sara Perry has an intriguing article in the most recent issue of Advance in Archaeological Practice 6.3 (2018), “Why Are Heritage Interpreters Voiceless at the Trowel’s Edge? A Plea for Rewriting the Archaeological Workflow.” She proposes that heritage interpreters should have a greater role in the excavation (and, I would assume, survey) process rather than being introduced to projects only after archaeologists have concluded the excavation, description, and interpretative work. For Perry, heritage interpreters are individuals responsible for communicating the results – both material and digital – of archaeological work for a wider audience, but, perhaps more importantly, these individuals have value even for archaeologists who are not particularly concerned with communicating the results of their work to a broad audience.

Perry proposes that archaeologists include specialist heritage interpreters in the archaeological workflow, on the trowel’s edge as it were. For Perry, these heritage interpreters do more than simply mediate between the disciplinary work of archaeology and the larger interests of the general public, but also serve to democratize archaeological knowledge and knowledge of the past by making it available to both specialists and non-specialists. I found her light sketch of the concept of bodystorming (a play on the idea of brainstorming) particularly provocative in that embraces the idea that being on site or in a place provides a particular and productive environment for archaeological knowledge making and for the interaction between heritage specialists and various other archaeological workers.    

A deeper and more integrated role for heritage specialists intrigued me, particularly in light of some of my work on “slow archaeology” (and my most recent effort to resolve the relationship between more democratic ways of thinking and disciplinary practices). I’ve struggled recently to resolve the tensions between disciplinarity and specialization in archaeology – and its close ties to industrial practices with their Taylorist impulses toward fragmenting knowledge into discrete, specialized bits – and an alternative tradition of archaeological practice grounded in craft. Perry appears to advocate for a hybridized practice in archaeology that recognizes, on the one hand, the role of specialists (including heritage specialists) whose knowledge and efforts are coordinated through the industrial concept of “workflow.” On the other hand, she also understands the potential for this workflow to be recursive and non-linear and for specialists to share their specialized knowledge across the entire process of archaeological knowledge making. There is this contradiction between specialized knowledge and the linearity implicit in workflow and the recursive practices that allow all specialists to move from the trowels edge to the general public mediated by individuals, technical skills, and shared knowledge. Of course, Hodder’s concept of reflexivity at all stages of archaeological work already assumed that the concepts like workflow and disciplinary specialists were no more “siloed” than the boxes of the Harris Matrix (and its similarity to [work]flow charts) represented empirically equivalent past events. In other words, while Perry’s inclusion of heritage specialists at the trowel’s edge is unique, the idea that archaeological workflows are reflexive and recursive is well known in archaeological circles, at least in theory.

The real question in my mind remains: will the specialization of archaeological skills and knowledge within the existing structure of archaeological practices lead to more democratized knowledge of the past within the discipline of archaeology?

My work has become hung up on the tension between specialized knowledge and democratic knowledge is at the core of archaeological practice. On the one hand, industrial models of knowledge making insist that any almost any individual from the elite practitioners to the volunteer field walker can play a small part in archaeological knowledge making. In fact, certain aspects of mass democracy and industrialization have followed in lockstep. It is hardly surprising that an industrial model for producing educated students is the backbone for the American model of university education and recent efforts to streamline this further have involved reducing the reliance on disciplinary specialists even further through the use of adjuncts (who do not lack specialized skills, but whose role in the modern university is less dependent on their specialized knowledge and more dependent on qualifications established by the educational assembly line), various automated forms of content delivery, and other 21st century techniques. In other words, concepts like “workflow” tend toward the deskilling of specialists. Heritage specialists whose role becomes defined by archaeological workflow run the risk of deskilling and will have to work counter to the industrial logic implicit in these ways of seeing archaeological work.

On the other hand, I tend to advocated a muddled view of for an alternative archaeology that wavers between appeals to a model of benign anarchism and that of pre-industrial craft production. The latter offers a view of the discipline that tends toward hierarchy with individuals who possess superior abilities achieving the status of master and others, through their aspirations, being apprentices and journeymen (or whatever the gender neutral version of that term is). The former, however, offers a more radically democratic view of the discipline that levels the ground between specialists and non-specialists by de-privileging the voice of specialization. The risk is, it would seem to me, that this radically democratic view of archaeological anarchism removes the privilege of authorizing a particular view of the past from archaeologists or historians, but runs the risk of turning the power of the past over to the strongest voice or the majority.

This thinking strays a good bit from Perry’s intriguing article, but I think her work continues to poke and prod at the idea of archaeological specialization, archaeological practice, and the nature of archaeological knowledge. Her argument that heritage specialists should be present at the trowel’s edge is important and consistent with my view that archaeological knowledge is grounded in an understanding of practice and place. At the same time, her hybrid view of archaeological workflow offers a compelling challenge to how we think about the organization of archaeological practices both on the ground – in a practical sense – but also as they relate to archaeological knowledge making. To my mind, the latter issue is the most pressing as it existing at the fraught intersection of archaeological methods, process, specialization, expertise, community, and public and scholarly communications.