Where are we now?
The last few posts might have been a bit more academic (and likely a little boring) but they’re important to help us understand the situation we’re in today. Archaeology, as a profession, only really started developing in the 80s and 90s, but as we saw in our short histories, much of that development was in theory and philosophy about how archaeology works. This also means that most of our innovations come in the form of interpretation and narrative building rather than in methods.
Battered and Bruised
One of the hard truths about archaeology is that the core practice, processes, and methods have changed very little over the last 150 years or so. The infighting and never-ending debates that have gripped archaeology for the last 80 years have prevented us from meaningfully discussing innovation and methods. The Processual-post-processual debates had a major impact on discussion and sharing in archaeology, leaving many battered and bruised, unwilling to poke their heads above the parapets. As a result, archaeology has become deeply fragmented along various lines with dozens and even hundreds of different factions developing.
The Fragmentation of Archaeology
Since that tumultuous period, archaeology has continued to develop but has grown in many different independent fragments. At the highest level, archaeology differs from country to country. Archaeology in the US and Canada is seen dramatically differently than most of the rest of the world. In North America, archaeology is firmly one of the 4-sub fields of Anthropology (along with bioanthropology, linguistic, and social-cultural anthropology). The rest of the world sees archaeology as a standalone field. We’ll come back to this in a deep-dive post on anthropology vs. archaeology (yet another contentious debate) but, for now, we’ll continue looking at the variation we see across the field.
Within each country we often see the same sorts of divisions you’d see in any field: a governmental sector, commercial, and academic sectors. Archaeology also has a fourth sector that is much larger than other fields in the form of a volunteer or hobbyist sector (again, more on that in another post!). This is where the fragmentation of archaeology really starts to become noticeable.
Within each sector we see all sorts of divisions (we’ll dive into these in the next post). In governmental archaeology it can vary from the National/Federal level down to the State level, and even straight down to Counties and Local Government levels. In the US for example, each State has its own State Historic Preservation Office. In the UK, each County has its own Planning Archaeologist who works between the government and commercial archaeologists. In most cases, each State, County, or Local Government has their own standards and expectations.
The commercial archaeological sector adds another layer of fragmentation with different methods, systems, tools, and needs. They must work within the fragmented governmental systems which means that in many cases archaeologists have to work within and understand multiple standards. What makes things even more difficult is that many of these companies work pragmatically. Meaning that they do what they can, with the tools they have, and the time they have. As a result, many archaeological companies are still using the same tools and systems that they always have. If they started in the 90s with a Microsoft Access Database, it’s likely they are still using that same database. In some cases, larger companies have multiple systems that are based on individual archaeologists. One archaeologist might insist on using a tool from 1998 (which requires a special computer running an emulator for them to use that). Another might insist on using only paper recording while others might insist on using a digital data collection process.
Academic archaeology throws a massive wrench into the mix and is likely the most fragmented sector of all. Most of academic archaeology is oriented towards the traditional archaeology everyone thinks of – slow excavations in the summer, long research periods with students and faculty, new technologies and tools being tested, and so on. Academic departments usually focus on non-local archaeology, an odd thing to do considering 90% of archaeologists end up working in local commercial archaeology. Instead, these departments focus on foreign archaeology and use those areas to develop new tools, technologies, and theories. Unfortunately, there is a very harsh divide between the academic sector and other sectors (yet another post!). Many of the innovative tools and technologies that are developed here stay in the areas where they are developed. This is particularly true of our theories and what others view as less practical tools.
We also have the volunteer and hobbyist sector, which is a little too complicated for this post, which is already long enough. Now we can see where we are. Although archaeology has innovative parts, new technologies being developed, new methods, these are often being created in fragmented parts. This is where ArchNova will play a role in developing new standards that are easier to achieve with the help of AI, allowing archaeologists to avoid the headache of working within multiple standards or systems.
