Archaeological theory and practice

...The aim of this special issue is to highlight the interdisciplinary nexus in a series of articles that span the intersection between the archaeologies and the different areas of information research. Huvila, Olsson, Faniel, Dalbello and Dallas (2017) have suggested earlier that it is possible to categorise the earlier research at the nexus of archaeology and information research into three broad categories: 1) management, organisation and retrieval as it relates to archaeological information work, 2) information behaviour and practices of archaeologists, and 3) archaeology of knowledge as a method for studying information science. The articles in this special issue advance work at the nexus of archaeology and information research in several respects. The empirical work on archaeological information practices in the first four articles brings together and advances earlier lines of inquiry, from an archaeological perspective with new insights from information research, and vice versa. The articles show that archaeology is an interesting setting for information research, because it provides a rich context for investigating broader empirical and conceptual issues of information work. Moreover, to understand the complexities of archaeological information work is essential for improving it, especially in the context of data creation, management, curation, and reuse. The last two articles in this issue highlight the empirical possibilities offered by the metaphorical archaeologies that have been explored infrequently and often in a relatively narrow sense in the earlier literature.

The organization of archaeological fieldwork often resembles a military-style campaign structured around rigid, top-down hierarchies. This is reflected in many aspects of current practice, including the ultimate authority of the site director, the use of excavation methodologies that remove the act of interpretation from field archaeologists, and the general deskilling and reification of archaeological labor in fieldwork. Though there have been several examples of resistance to this hierarchical model we maintain that a sustained critique could stem from an unexpected source: the creation of communities that model anarchist principles through the implementation of the single context methodology in archaeology. In this article we explore the potential for anarchist praxis in archaeological fieldwork and the implications of anarchist thought on the issues of authority and non-alienation of labor in a neoliberal landscape.

CALL FOR PAPERS: GLOCAL ARCHAEOLOGY

The Archaeological Review from Cambridge invites submissions for volume 33.1, which explores the theme of ‘Glocal Archaeology’.
Contributions are welcome from researchers at any stage of their academic career and from all related disciplines.

Potential contributors are welcome to discuss their ideas with the editors or register their interest by sending an abstract to ljf51@cam.ac.uk and jet71@cam.ac.uk. Papers of up to 4000 words in length should be submitted by 1st August 2017. Further information on the Archaeological Review from Cambridge, including submission guidelines, may be found at http://www.societies.cam.ac.uk/arc/

Few human communities have remained uncontacted by outsiders both in the past and in the present. Yet, only modern European colonialism affected the whole world. It is difficult to disentangle the relationship between Europe and the archaeology of colonialism, for they are historically bonded. The latter has been widely explored by archaeologists; however, the colonial implications of our archaeological practice have only started to be examined recently. The interpretation of the colonial past and the neo-colonial present has been heavily contested by powerful social groups and indigenous communities in many occasions, and archaeologists have not always had an easy way out. Unveiling and questioning our own geopolitical position and worldviews when doing archaeology is fundamental if we want to decolonise our knowledge and practice. On the one hand, there are many European teams working on different archaeological projects in their former colonies – what are the social and political implications of that? How do we engage as outsiders with local communities that are completely alien to our own experience? On the other hand, the way we construct our knowledge is deeply rooted in our own (Western) experience, i.e. how we define concepts such as ‘identity’, ‘landscape’, or ‘culture’ may differ from how local communities actually understand them. How do we integrate local knowledges into our ‘scientific’ discourse? We warmly invite researchers from different geographies and backgrounds to submit papers that deal with these questions and the intersections between archaeological practice and politics in colonial or neo-colonial contexts.

Many postprocessual archaeologists have argued that active individuals make history. The apotheosis of the individual has been achieved under the rubric “identity,” the most pervasive theoretical term of the last few years. This focus obscures the fundamental idea that individuals do not exist in isolation. The relational concept of struggle will help us past this theoretical impasse. This concept has many components including real struggles in the past, our struggles to know the past, and using the past to struggle in the present. Our goal is to “struggle past” identity politics and the individual by focusing on peoples' real struggles in real cases.

View-only, full-text PDF of the introduction (courtesy of Springer Nature SharedIt initiative) available from: <http://rdcu.be/j7LU>.  Downloadable, full-text manuscript (authors' accepted version) of the introduction archived by the University of Bradford: <http://hdl.handle.net/10454/9906>.  Full issue can be found at: <https://link.springer.com/journal/10816/23/3/page/1>.
         
Ghisleni L, Jordan AM and Fioccoprile E, eds (2016) “Binary Binds”: Deconstructing Sex and Gender Dichotomies in Archaeological Practice. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 23(3, special issue): 765-969. With papers by Arnold B, Belcher EH, Cobb H, Croucher K, Ferrer M, Jordan AM, Matić U, Moral E and Stratton S.