Three Article Thursday: Waste, Pots, and the Complexities of Colonial Archaeology

I’ve been writing. Not quite frantically, but consistently over the last few weeks and that has cut a bit into my reading time. The issue of writing versus reading balance continues to be a challenge. I find it easier to find time to write — even just for a half an hour — than to read in a focused way. This week, though, I had a few opportunities to read shorter things making it a good time for a Three Thing Thursday:

Thing the First: Waste Pickers in Tehran

I remain fascinated by the emerging discourse on waste in archaeology of the contemporary world. Waste, trash, garbage, and discard practices cuts across archaeological processes and evokes the history of using archaeology to document the contemporary situation. Maryam Dezhamkhooy’s “Wandering Waste: Informal Waste Work and the Externalization of People and Landscapes in Iran,” Current Anthropology 65.5 (2024) offers a compelling (and tragic) example of how the study of waste disposal as the archaeology of social practice. Dezhamkhooy’s article examines the role of young Afghan immigrants in the practice of collecting, sorting, and disposing trash from the city of Tehran. Not only is the work dirty and unsafe, but the social conditions in which it takes place are degrading and the close association with trash disposal makes the humans associated with it disposable to Iranian society (and the system which employs the Afghan workers). This argument parallels trends elsewhere in the developed (and developing) world and shows how social practices and expectations developed in the so-called “Global North” shape practices in the Global South. In effect the global pattern of shipping waste from more economically prosperous and political powerful northern countries to more disadvantaged southern countries plays out on the national scale within Iran where economically and politically vulnerable Afghan migrants sort and discard trash collected from the affluent and gentrifying northern neighborhoods and Tehran in a district to the south of the city where waste disposal, prisons, and other marginalized practices cluster.

What made this article all the more interesting is the inclusion of feedback from a gaggle of preeminent scholars in the field of waste disposal and migrant studies. These scholars offered, occasionally scathing, critical insights to which the author then responded. The collegiality of the exchange was truly remarkable and offered a useful reminder of the potential of open peer review processes.

Thing the Second: Pot Production in Paphos and Northwestern Cyprus

I’ve been working on a paper for the annual ASOR meeting on our work at Polis (ancient Arsinoe). One of the sites that we’ll produce a kiln and levigating pool. Those of you who follow my work will not find this particularly interesting.

That said, the work at the Paphos Agora by the Polish team is offering us another comparanda for our work at Polis. Edyta Marzec and Kamila Nocoń,  “Another Strand in the Web: The Connection between New Paphos and the Region of North-Western Cyprus Based on an Integrated Investigation of the Middle and Late Roman Cooking Pottery” Oxford Journal of Archaeology 43.4 (2024) makes some useful arguments for our current work at Polis. They argue that Dhiorios, the well-known production site of very common Late Roman and Early Byzantine cook pots was probably producing cooking wares as early as the Middle Roman period. More importantly than that, the authors use XRF and petrography to argue that some of the forms of Middle and Late Roman pottery are likely produced locally (to Paphos). 

One the challenges facing us at Polis is discerning whether the remains of ceramic production at the site should be understood as regional level production or local production. It is tempting to see evidence for locally produced cooking pots which nevertheless follow regional forms as a sign of locally manufactured pottery that might be superficially indistinguishable from its regional parallels.

Thing the Third: How Does Visibility Count? 

I very much enjoyed reading Néhémie Strupler’s “How Does Visibility Count? An Open Data-Driven Approach to Compare the Use of Ground Visibility in Archaeological Field-Walking Surveys in the Mediterranean Region” in Archaeological Prospection (2024). He conducts an “open data-driven exploratory analysis” using data drawn from PKAP, SCSP, and the Antikythera Survey Project. His main concern was how various different was of assessing surface visibility produced different patterns in artifact distribution. By using the published data from the three projects he showed how displaying the data according to project defined visibility management strategies, revealed slight changes in the prospective distribution patterns of ceramics in each survey area. Fortunately, the difference between the distribution patterns was fairly modest in all the datasets tested. The larger point, however, is that projects could display their data in more interesting and even more transparent ways to show how approaches to visibility shape interpretative patterns.