[MUSIC].

Question, when do you stop doing field

work?
When is an archeological project
finished?
Now there's lots of answers to that
question.
Some projects never die, nor do they fade
away.
The American School of Classical Studies
has been digging in Athens and Greece.
You see it here, since 1931.
The Austrians at Ephesus and Turkey,
actually since the 1890's.
This kind of project is often referred to
as a big dig.
Now other projects are delimited by the
permitting structures, the legal
authorization to conduct fieldwork, of
the country in which they're carried out.
This is usually done under the aegis of a
Department of Antiquities, a Ministry of
Culture, or, and increasingly a Ministry
of Tourism.
This is an absolutely essential stage in
archaeological planning.
You can't just wander out and go dig a
hole in the ground anywhere you feel
like, unless at least in some countries
you own that land yourself.
So permitting processes are both rigorous
and taken very seriously.
But the rules vary enormously from nation
state to nation state.
I've worked in countries where you're
granted three years for active field
work, with some study to follow.
That's it.
Others allow you to keep going more or
less indefinitely.
So, others will allow continued work, but
only if certain requirements, a
publication for example, are completed.
I would encourage you to explore what the
situation is in your own country, I'd be
very curious to learn.
Now, when else is it time to stop field
work?
It might be that you've run out of money,
a scenario that is entirely possible,
archaeology is not inexpensive, not if
you do it responsibly.
And especially if you do it in a country
not your own.
You might stop if you're out of time, if
you're working under pressure.
For example doing rescue archaeology, and
the bulldozer's rolling in, the dam is
being constructed, and so on.
Or you might stop if you're excavating
when you basically hit bottom.
Sterile soil, virgin soil.
The level untouched by human activity.
Hitting sterile for an archaeologist is
as far down as you want to go.
Geologists are different, of course.
They are just getting going at that
point.
Or you might stop because you've answered
all of the questions you had for the
place you're investigating.
Though I actually have trouble believing
that any archaeologist has ever felt that
way.
That they had it all figured out, that it
was all done.
There's always something else to look
for, always somewhere else to explore.
Always that one little thing you hope to
find, that little bit more.
It can be very hard to stop.
But let's, let's back up a step.
What do we mean by stop?
What needs to be done before you're done?
Now the usual image of the archaeologist
is as busy and happy and down in the
dirt, the archaeologist at the moment of
discovery.
But that's really only the first stage of
a very long line of stages.
Now we tend to privilege "in the field"
activities, but they are only one part of
a long chain of building archaeological
evidence.
So let's follow out that chain.
Let's say you find something, an ugly
potsherd, a Paleolithic hand ax, a buried
statue, a coin, or and more likely you're
going to be getting many such objects.
You can find literally thousands and
thousands of potsherds, and you have to
deal with them all.
So what do you do with this stuff?
How do you handle it?
How do you even make the most of its
information?
Fulfill your obligations, legal, ethical
to it.
Now, I'm going to just kind of run
through a very basic version here.
Obviously, there are variations project
to project, but certain things are key.
First, before you even take it from the
site or the place you found it, you note
its context, you put it in a bag or
otherwise provide a label that says
clearly and consistently where it came
from.
And that context should stick to that
object like grim death.
If you don't do that, if you lose that
correlation, this is this and it came
from here, then you've wasted everyone's
time.
So you find, label, make safe, transport
carefully, and you bring it back to where
you're staying and working.
Now sometimes this is a nice, dedicated
project house.
Sometimes it's rented apartments.
Sometimes it's the local school.
Sometimes it's tents.
And this is where you will process the
material.
Follow out those various stages of taking
care of the artifact, of studying it, and
ultimately of interpreting and publishing
it.
Now the first step in processing, you
gotta be able to see it.
See the object clearly.
You gotta get the dirt off.
So there's a lot of pottery washing and
pottery drying in archeology.
Then the object will go to relevant
experts, someone who knows their Anasazi
pottery or their prehistoric lithics or
their Islamic coins or the Roman statues,
whatever.
And this underlines a point that I'm sure
you've picked up by now.
Archaeology, is the ultimate team sport.
You can't really do this by yourself,
especially today, if you ever could.
There's just too much to know, too many
skill sets required.
It takes a village.
So these experts that you'll need they
will be the ones to identify, date,
measure and otherwise describe the find.
Either these expert individuals, or other
members of the team will then draw,
photograph what is necessary.
It might not be absolutely everything,
but this is in part to create a permanent
record of the material.
Material which might after all be lost,
or stolen, or destroyed by natural
disaster or by war.
All of this has been known.
Such documentation also of course allows
in the fullness of time for reproduction
in various forms of publication.
Now some objects might require
conservation.
If you have more than one bit of the same
pot you can put it back together.
Organic remains will surely need
attention to preserve them, same with
metals.
Now this activity might happen in the
field or more likely things will be
transferred back to some more formal
museum or laboratory context.
Finally, the object must be stored
somewhere, a very, very, very, very, very
tiny minority will go on display,
exhibited for the general public in
whatever museum, but the vast majority
will go into long term storage.
For a duty of any archaeological project.
Is to provide for the safekeeping of all
objects found, for which it is
responsible.
This is a core obligation in most
countries, but it can be a heavy one.
Given that one excavation or one survey
can generate literally tons of pottery
and other finds.
So finding the space to keep artifacts is
an increasing burden on many
archeological projects.
And many national antiquities
departments.
Store rooms are already over bursting
with material and more is coming in all
the time, more material, more material.
And in too many cases, often unpublished
material.
Now of all the stages in this process
from discovery to
being put away, I would stress two
things.
First, in an ideal world you will always
be able to tell where an object came
from.
I want someone, this is a shout-out to
engineers in the audience, I want someone
to invent little bar codes for potsherds.
And second and vitally, artifacts stay in
the country of their origin unless
explicit authoritative permission is
given to take it elsewhere.
Now that permission's usually granted for
analytic purposes.
You have something that needs scientific
testing, radiocarbon dating or so on,
things you just can't do in country.
But, this is the law of the land in just
about every place on earth, unless the
objects are looted and make it on to the
black market.
But that's another story.
Let me end with, you know one more dirty
little secret, archeologists are not
always good.
In fact, we are often very bad about
publishing our projects, publishing our
material.
There are some pretty startling
statistics out there about the ratio of
work done to work published.
Yet publication in whatever form should
be the final act of any archaeological
project.
It is in many ways the most important.
If your data and your interpretations are
not made accessible to fellow
professionals, to the public then it
would better not to have done the work at
all.
Because remember again, again, many forms
of archaeology disturb, many forms of
archaeology destroy.
Now to be fair, publishing archaeology
isn't easy, I too have some skeletons in
my closet, nobody's perfect.
It's a lot of data, a lot of boring
catalogs, lot's of boring potsherds,
there's a lot of technical stuff.
Very expensive to produce in old style
book print format.
So archaeologists are increasingly
getting into digital formats and online
presentation.
Many of us are all for making as much
archaeological data as possible open
access, or whatever it takes to build
larger and more robust data sets.
So we aren't always just thinking about
where I work, what I found.
Another positive trend is a growing
interest in legacy data.
Alright, someone dug a site decades ago,
didn't publish it, they're now dead.
And all the stuff is sitting in a museum
somewhere collecting dust, or worse.
This is a very common phenomenon in many
countries.
So what then can we do?
Do we let it sit?
Or if there's any kind of documentation
at all.
Should we try to go back and figure
things out?
Reclaim the site.
Get it back into the land of the living.
You could call this digging in the
storeroom, and it raises a heartening
picture of archaeology getting done in the
back rooms of museums, and not out in the
field.
It's a different kind of conservation
ethic.
Don't waste resources.
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