Scale (and Isthmia)

I was really excited to read Katie Kearns’s recent article in Heritage, “Everyday Climates: Household Archaeologies and the Politics of Scale.” It’s open-access; so you can read it too. Kearns argues for the significance of household scale research especially in the archaeology of climate change. This challenges the idea that global problems (or situations) require global approaches best conducted at the macro- if not planetary scale. She calls these approaches “big-scale” approaches.

For archaeology, the lure of big-scale approaches has fed the development of large-scale, collaborative archaeological work that often pulls together large quantities of climate data, site based information, and quantitative analysis. Big-scale archaeology relies on big-data to produce “big archaeology.” There is nothing wrong with this, but for many of us, archaeology remains better at producing small-scale knowledge through the intensive and often painstaking practice of excavation. Consequently there has emerged a bit of a mismatch between our hyper-focused practices and our desire for planetary conclusions. To be clear, Kearns does not argue this, but it feels tacit in her turn to household level archaeology to understand changes in storage patterns, consumption and discard, and gender based household economies. Going smaller teases out the human level impact of climate change and offers a counter-balance to the state, society, and transregional arguments often favored by archaeologists studying climate change.

For our work at Isthmia, Kearns’s recognition of small-scale archaeology was a welcome validation. While we’re not working on climate change, in particular, we are interested in certain phenomenon that like climate change, are often studied on the transregional and global level. We’re interested in the shadow of empire at the site of Isthmia where the massive, imperially funded Hexamilion Wall of the 5th century defines the spatial organization of the area. We’re also interested in using a “Dark Age” settlement of the 7th or 8th century as a way to think about demographic, economic, and social change often considered at the regional level. To do this, we’ve decided to dig down in the complexities of site formation in the late history of a 2nd century Roman bath and the traces of evidence left behind by households that lived in the bath’s ruins for what may have been only a few decades in a period of tremendous instability. Over 50 years of legacy data produced by the Isthmia Excavations supports this kind of analysis.

This is also true for our work at Polis.

I still think about slow archaeology and I suspect there is a connection between slow archaeology and small archaeology. These two approaches lean into the detailed, patient, and careful work that often requires limited focus and often produces correspondingly limited (or human, if you will) conclusions. 

The opposite is probably a kind of fast or big-archaeology. I can avoid feeling today that “big archaeology” (like big science) endures critiques (if not downright attacks) from both sides of the ideological spectrum. Reducing the plurality and complexity of the human experience to data even when it is in the name of progress risks complicity with the very forces that have created many of the contemporary crises from the start. There is a reason why our work is sometimes known as the industrial-military-university-archaeology complex. 

Of course, now, I’m getting away from Kearns’s argument and run the risk of deploying them in the service for things that may not align with her views! Check out the article, though.