Writing Wednesday: Illich and Publishing

David Pettegrew and I are working to finish some revisions on our paper for the Journal of Field Archaeology’s 50th anniversary issue. Our paper (which you can sample here and here) benefited immensely (from our perspective) from the feedback of the three peer reviewers. 

In particular, they nudged us to tighten up our use of certain concepts especially Ivan Illich’s notion of conviviality, which I have used in more polished ways in other publications. The reviewer was right and I set myself the task of retooling my superficial (and honestly lazy) application of Illich.

The following section follows from a short and perfunctory introduction. It introduces critiques of final reports offered across the discipline and juxtaposes them with approaches informed by Illich’s notion of conviviality. We then point toward how we will use conviviality in our paper and how it shaped David’s book, Corinthian Countrysides Linked Open Data and Analysis from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey .

Open, Scholar-Led Publishing: A Convivial Approach to Reporting in Archaeology

As long as the JFA has existed, archaeologists have debated the nature of archaeological publishing and its intersections with disciplinary practice. Almost a half century ago, the journal featured a pair of influential essays by the journal’s editor and by a curator of a major museum outlining the ethical issues surrounding the publication of unprovenienced artifacts acquired on the art market (cf. Wiseman and Muscalla 1981). More recently, contributors have brought attention to the potential of publishing archaeology “at the digital turn” (Opitz 2018), the prospects and challenges of archaeological “big data” (Various authors, JFA 2020), and persistent gender inequality in publishing in our profession (Hanscam and Witcher 2023).

Archaeologists of all stripes have critiqued the character of traditional reports, Many of these critiques reflect more reflective approaches to field work, the changing landscape of archaeological ethics, a growing attention to the plurality of perspectives on the past, and new technologies which allow for new ways to present and analyze archaeological data. In light of the persistent dynamism of the methods, ethics, technologies, and priorities present in our discipline, scholars have increasingly criticized reports and grey literature as boring and unreadable in their imitation of the dry, analytic style of lab and field sciences. Moreover, the tendency for archaeologists to appeal to older empirical and often positivist paradigms of knowledge making in the structure of their reports, scholars have recognized the growing disconnect between between the form of archaeological writing and our discipline’s epistemological commitments (Hodder 1989, 1993; Mickel 2013; Chapman and Wylie 2016; Lucas 2018). As an example relevant for our work in this article, the transformation of digital practices in the field has fundamentally altered the processes of fieldwork and reporting, and this, in turn, has raised questions about the mode and finality of interpretation (Roosevelt 2015; Averett, Counts, and Gordon 2016; and Gartski 2020). The close connection between born digital data produced in the field and tools that make the publication (or at least dissemination) of such “raw data” possible calls into the question the value of summative interpretations and analysis that foreground one, final, and authoritative interpretation at the expense of the information necessary to offer alternatives. As Gavin Lucas has noted (2018), renewed interest in the relationship between published digital data produced in the field and any single authoritative interpretation of the past anticipate a return to epistemological concerns as they emphasize the connection between narrative forms of publication and exposition, and the changing character of archaeological practices and methods. Giorgio Buccaletti (2017) has shown how the fragmentary character of digital-born data, in particular, invites archaeologists to make visible the relationship between highly granular archaeological details and long-form written arguments. At the same time, this approach makes it possible to untangle the cables which support archaeological knowledge, to use Alison Wylie’s fortuitous metaphor (Wylie 1989). In sum, the increasingly transparent relationship between digital data and published archaeological argument has made it possible for scholars to interrogate the finality of archaeological reports (e.g. Strupler 2021). While clearly reports remain vital for explaining and contextualizing archaeological work and its results, the push to make data available for reuse invites knowledge making to continue as an iterative and community-oriented process. 

Promisingly, archaeologists have made use of digital media and platforms to engage more creatively in their writing, to make the foundation of their arguments more transparent, and to invite participation in analysis and interpretation that lead to richer, more diverse and multivocal narratives (Tringham 2004). A case in point is Rachel Opitz’s 2018 article in this journal about publishing the excavations of Gabii, which demonstrates that digital practices need not simply reinforce the granular character of digital information, but may introduce authentic and diverse forms of narrative and storytelling. A Mid-Republican House from Gabii illustrates the potential of creative collaborations between archaeologists (the Gabii Project) and publishers (University of Michigan Press) to produce engaging, data-infused excavation reports that challenge the traditional notion of a final publication and attract new audiences. Digital publication, reporting, and archiving in this respect may be designed to “enchant” archaeological sites, contexts, and landscapes through encouraging user-centered creation and reflection (Perry 2019). Archaeological reporting need not assume the dry style noted above, but can be enhanced to draw readers into the process of meaning making. 

Our contribution to these important developments in the field will focus on the process of publishing as the locus for knowledge making. In particular, we will emphasize scholar-led practices as a form of conviviality. In this context, conviviality draws on the concept developed by Ivan Illich (1975) and encompasses shared practices in knowledge making common to the close knit and familiar relationships that characterize archaeological field work (see Given 2017; 2018). Illich’s concept of conviviality emphasizes the potential of informal and open-ended collaboration that eschew contemporary (or even more broadly modern) concerns for efficiency and scalability. Illich argued that technology often introduced new forms of authority often vested in bureaucratic processes that sought to optimize the relationship between human behavior and technology. While these processes promised greater efficiency–with lower costs, with greater access, and with the potential for longer, and even better lives, they have also limited the freedom of individuals by enforcing conformity. Elsewhere, we have described how our approach to collaborative and scholar-led publishing in archaeology drew upon conviviality to allow us to escape practices constrained by the efficiency of an assembly-line model of publishing and knowledge making (Caraher 2022). We argue that as the tools for the analysis, publication, and dissemination of archaeological knowledge become more available to more individuals, it becomes possible to reimagine archaeological publishing as less of a separate step bound up in legitimizing the authority of the author and the text and more as a part in an open-ended continuum of knowledge making that acknowledges the contingency of all interpretation. Thus, convivial practices allowed us to offer an alternative to archaeology’s dependence on the processes, constraints, and imprimatur of academic publishing and the tendency of these practices to serve to validate the authority of the author and the legitimacy of published knowledge. While traditional academic publishers will and should continue to play a role in our professional ecosystem, implementing approaches to collaborative, scholar-led publishing inspired us to situate publishing practices within a continuum of collaborative knowledge making that begins in the field and continues beyond the publication of the results of field work. 

Illich also saw the advantage of simple, low-cost technologies in supporting convivial practice. In this context, we recognize that do-it-yourself (DIY) approaches that prioritize inexpensive ad hoc solutions and off-the-shelf components offer viable and widely available alternatives to the growing costs associated with producing and disseminating digital data rewards. Open source software, for example, developed by informal communities often provide alternatives to specialized (and highly commercialized) software and expertise. Subscription based software, while nefarious in its long term costs, also allows for the occasional and short term use of professional tools such as the Adobe Suite with a robust and supportive base of users. Likewise, shared expertise between project directors, authors, digital data publishers, and scholars with book publishing skills can support the development of collaborative, scholar-led publishing as a convivial alternative to traditional publishing. Scholar-led publishing practices in archaeology integrate publishing more deeply into the archaeological processes that start in the field (or even earlier) and continue through the appearance of linked data publication (Caraher 2022).

As we will highlight in our case study, convivial collaborations in publishing can be difficult, messy, and complex, yet also rewarding in embodying the shared commitment to knowledge making as a process that continues through and after publication. The forms that convivial, scholar-led publishing produces often require us to balance between, on the one hand, the consistency required to produce linked open data whose standardized semantics and structure allow it to be useful and legible to both human and computers and, on the other, approaches that reflect the complex commitments (and limitations) present in the publishing team. The results are often unique to the projects themselves and the character of the community responsible for the archaeological knowledge. But all convivial publications have the potential to resist the priorities central to the commodified character of traditional archaeological publishing. For example, the inefficiency of scholar led publishing mitigates against the emphasis on scalability which often produces homogenized results that constrain form and character of interpretations possible. The collaborative character of scholar led publishing both requires and creates pathways for wider participation in analysis and knowledge making (Schimmel 2022). As a result, this article is not proposing a publishing paradigm that another project could adopt wholesale for their own work. Instead, we have found inspiration in the potential of collaborative and convivial archaeological knowledge making that starts in the field and continues through the publication process.

By extending the convivial processes that Given has noted are central to archaeological field work (Given 2017) through scholar-led publication, archaeologists can create an alternative approach to publishing archaeology which continues a commitment to convivial knowledge making from the field to the publication process. To be clear, we recognize that our appeal to Illich’s notions of conviviality in this article stretch this concept to (and perhaps beyond) its intended limits. For example, we understand that the line between traditional collaborative practices and genuinely convivial field work is blurry (pace Given 2017). One reviewer of this article honed in on this ambiguity and noted that views of archaeological field work taking place under the restrictive gaze of a single, authoritative director is mostly a straw person in contemporary disciplinary practice. As a result, most field work is collaborative while still structured to privilege the shared values of the project rather than that of the individual. Forms, for example, serve to standardize field practices and observations and, as the article below introduces and Corinthian Countrysides details, workflow from field walkers (in the case of EKAS) to team leaders to field director to project directors present a bureaucracy that structured individual freedom of observation. This core component in the EKAS methods requires both authority and collaboration. At the same time, we feel the character of EKAS field work processes which we will discuss in detail below, created the circumstances that allowed for the convivial publishing practices that we have anticipated above. Moreover, this foregrounds the collaboration central to archaeological work and epistemology and extends the potential of convivial analysis beyond the publication of the book. It subordinates the authority of the author, legitimized through traditional publishing practices, to the authority of the larger community of archaeologists and future readers who make use of the digital data.