Archaeological Fieldwork

Archaeological Fieldwork MARCUS W. R. BRITTAIN University of Cambridge, UK Fieldwork is practical research conducted in the context of a site or a landscape. It is multidisciplinary and comprises a range of techniques and methodologies that may be utilized in the identification, recovery, and recording of archaeological data. Archaeological fieldwork is most often directly equated with excavation—a range of techniques that provide an intrusive entry into an archaeological resource, and which is perceived to distinguish archaeological fieldwork from that pursued in other sciences. However, there are a multitude of non- or less-intrusive techniques in archaeological fieldwork (such as differing forms of ground or aerial survey) that share methodological bases (and origins) with other sciences. Fieldwork is a blend of investigative standards and innovative practice. Commitment to a methodological strategy, for example, may require recognized techniques modified as appropriate to particular circumstances of fieldwork, such as in response to the characteristics of a site’s topography and its geology; the quality and scale of archaeological preservation; the logistics of a site’s geography, including its sociopolitical context; and the nature and scale of a project’s specific research priorities, expectations, and financial resources. Basic methods remain similar to the origins of fieldwork, but are greatly enhanced by the depth and detail of scientific techniques and experience of expertise. The relationship between fieldwork (as the recovery of data) and theory (as the interpretation of data) is conceived in a number of ways that, rather than simply reflecting historical advancement across the discipline, are a result of the multiplicity of conceptual frameworks through which archaeology is practiced and understood today. The origins of fieldwork as a practice performed by scientists may be found in the activities of naturalists and geologists in the later nineteenth century, as well as in antiquarian studies. Similar to the collection of specimens, excavation was simply a recovery method for items of material culture and supplemental to topographic survey. Disciplinary advancement emerged through analysis of collections by individuals not necessarily engaged in the attribution of specimens through fieldwork. As a consequence, a broad distinction emerged between the intellectual pursuit of collections and the practical collation of specimens in the field. Where written records may not have sufficed, the cultural progress of humanity could be traced in the stylistic and typological developments of material collections; understanding the evolution of human society owed little to the specific qualities and character of individual sites. Archaeological conceptions of human cultures through principles of evolution may account for the limited status assigned to fieldwork in the nineteenth century (Lucas 2001). Emphasis was instead placed upon material collections and their classification into a universalized scheme. Emergence in the early twentieth century of a particularistic conception of human cultures, such as the historical assemblage of areal cultural groups, established the importance of objects’ spatial and temporal context, and thereby enhanced fieldwork as integral to archaeological analysis. Primary to the concern of culture history were questions of what, where, and when? Greater standardization of data collection via fieldwork was a requirement for comparison of material assemblages across cultural groups. It is therefore not coincidental that in the first half of the twentieth century a growing number of field manuals emerged that defined standards and methodological principles required for scientific archaeological fieldwork. By the 1960s, the solidity of these principles and the questions for which they were developed underwent a radical transformation, most notably as a part of the “new archaeology” (or processual archaeology) in which fieldwork was aimed towards questions concerned more with how and why cultural changes take The Encyclopedia of Archaeological Sciences. Edited by Sandra L. López Varela. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. DOI: 10.1002/9781119188230.saseas0027 2 A R CH A E O L O G I CA L F I E L D WO R K place, rather than simply recording the traits that determine cultural definition. Advocates of this approach argue that archaeological data from particular regions contains information necessary to identify and to study the complex systems behind cultural processes, such as regular patterns of behavior; however, the visibility of relevant information is inhibited by a lack of statistical control during fieldwork (Binford 1964). Isolating the kind of data required to solve this problem may therefore be achieved via appropriate sampling strategies designed specifically for hypothesis testing against the immediate and unique circumstances of data recovery. This is a reflexive process in which feedback from data analysis leads to the modification of the sampling strategy during subsequent fieldwork. To the philosophical traditions of culture history and processual archaeology common methods and aims are desirable to the development of a unified discipline in which data recovery might facilitate intersite or crossregional comparison. Indeed, many of the principles that have emerged from this goal lie at the core of field research design. Ideally, this is a structuring framework conducted with a procedure that includes reconnaissance (survey and background research), evaluation (intrusive sampling for site characterization), strategy planning and excavation (method of data identification and recovery), and analysis of data upon which future strategies may be modified (Carver 2011). Across a number of European nations, as well as North America, Australasia, and Japan, the majority of archaeological fieldwork has functioned within the framework of development and its attendant planning legislation. This is a reactive process, carried out in response to individual development, and requires assessment of the archaeological character and significance of the area affected by a proposed development and the likely impact that this may incur. This has led to numerous and major archaeological operations, sometimes on a substantial scale. In general, the same procedures of field research design outlined above are implemented, but the exposure of enormous areas far greater than was previously possible has allowed for detailed reflection as to the success of evaluation and sampling methodologies. Owing to the competitive nature of opentender contracts in development-led archaeology, pragmatic constraints often posed by limited time and financial resources, and perhaps also as a response to its expanded professional status, a degree of standardization in fieldwork methodology has emerged. On the one hand, this provides a baseline against which to adjudge the quality of archaeological investigations; on the other hand, sampling strategies designed to locate the anticipated presence of particular features of a site are constrained with bias towards these types of site. Instead, by employing a spirit of experimentation and innovation, particularly in sampling exercises, fieldwork may with greater accuracy determine the appropriate levels of work required on these sites. A recent example of experimentation and refined sampling methodology is found in Cambridgeshire’s fenland in the United Kingdom (Evans, Tabor, and Vander Linden 2014). This comes from a large decade-long investigation of a series of small riverine islands sealed by thick overlying strata, excavated in advance of their destruction by aggregate quarrying. In this situation, particular conditions of burial had ensured that archaeological deposits survived in great quantity in sealed paleosols (ancient land surfaces) and overlying ploughsoil. The scale of these residues presented challenges of strategy and prioritization. Whereas cut features were comparatively limited in their numbers, tens of thousands of artifacts were encountered throughout the thick, sealed paleosol. Differing complementary techniques were employed at different stages of the fieldwork in light of incremental experience gained in ongoing methodological experimentation. This was not simply employed to achieve maximum data recovery (total recovery would have been an impossibility, given the scale of the finds numbers and ground coverage compared with available resources); the aim was to answer specific questions so as to avoid the repetition of preformed assumptions about past behavior and long-term cultural development. In this instance, where the scale of past activity is matched by the intensity of investigation, a distinct “narrative” was gestated during the immediacy of fieldwork, and ultimately framed by particular ways of (and reasons for) thinking and doing. A R CH A E O L O G I CA L F I E L D WO R K Reevaluation of fieldwork has, since the 1990s, centered upon the connection between theory and practice, or thinking and doing. Like the example above, this has expanded upon discussions concerning sampling in fieldwork and its implications to an understanding of archaeological data by problematizing the assumption that fieldwork is an objective activity and that its primary function is the acquisition of data separate from and prior to the processes of interpretation and writing “narratives.” Drawing insight from philosophies of science, two important themes have emerged in contemporary debates concerning fieldwork: (1) First contact with the material traces of the past takes place within the field and is an interpretative practice; and (2) fieldwork takes place in, and is a part of, a material world that channels practices of interpretation. These themes are outlined below. A key aim has been to foreground fieldwork as a practice and an experience that has a significant—indeed, founding—role in the production of knowledge. The fieldworker is foregrounded as central to this reevaluation, and viewed as partaking in a dynamic and subjective encounter with residues of the past (Hodder 1999). In the immediacy of this encounter, the fieldworker’s craft greatly relies upon a developed sensory register that is learnt through practice, such as an ability to “read” the traces of past occupation in a landscape’s lumps and bumps, anticipating a subtle change in a soil deposit through its appearance and the texture of the grain, or recognizing material by its weight, size, and form. Such skills develop over time and through experience, and are applied together with a multitude of factors (e.g., related deposits and other archaeological features; the accumulation of data from elsewhere on a site) to make informed judgments that determine what is archaeological from the nonarchaeological, and to distinguish relevant data from what is often highly fragmented and mixed traces. Highlighted in contemporary philosophical debates concerning fieldwork is that archaeological data is not necessarily predetermined prior to its recognition in fieldwork, awaiting its discovery. This challenge emerged from a broader concern in post-processual archaeology: that knowledge is not discovered out of neutral evidence, but is instead a product of social and 3 political conditions through which the practice of archaeology is constituted. According to this principle, fieldwork is not simply an exercise in data recovery and collection, but by mobilizing an assembly of different material bodies and agencies it is active in the production of data (Lucas 2012). Within these contemporary views of fieldwork, the production of data is contingent upon innovation in the strategies, techniques, and technologies available for their identification, recording, and recovery. Another example of large-scale investigations in the United Kingdom illustrates the integration of a number of these principles at the heart of field research design. Carried out before the construction of a new terminal at Heathrow Airport, fieldwork was conceived around the premise that changes in material conditions at any given location made the living of varied kinds of life a possibility (Andrews, Barrett, and Lewis 2000). Communities across time inhabit places that already have a history with which past communities would have had to contend in different ways at different points of time. This was a driving theme throughout the field research design. During fieldwork, excavation staff worked with an integrated site database examining historical changes of the “natural” and “built” environment, and the character and effect of long-term formation processes on these, as well as the material expression of human response to the accumulation of these factors. The field research design facilitated preliminary and rapid site-based analysis and feedback and the development of a site “narrative” through field-based interrogation that could be further refined through off-site analysis: a dialogue between on-site and off-site analyses. Accepting the fragmentary nature of the archaeological record and the status of data as a product of interpretation, the visibility of data redundant to the emerging narrative could be defined. An accompanying argument to the production of data through acts of interpretation is that the fieldworker is bound within the larger assemblage of material and conceptual entities, and is materially constituted as a field practitioner by an ability to mobilize an array of tools for recognition (trowel, toothpick, brush, etc.), measurement (measuring tape, grid peg, electric distance meter, etc.), and recording (pencil, camera, 3D scanner, etc.) of archaeological data. These materials are 4 A R CH A E O L O G I CA L F I E L D WO R K part of a broader collective, the status of which, and their relationship to archaeological narrative, may differ depending on their combination and on their context of assemblage. The site archive has been provided as a particular example of this, and a further illustration of the material world relevant to fieldwork (Olsen et al. 2012). In this frame, the archive is the stabilization and collation of an otherwise fragmented record by means of a range of media, such as digital and film photographs, soil and organic samples, drawn sections and plans, digital spatial data and imagery, finds, and accompanying paper registry, including notes, diaries, and correspondence. The archive may be regarded as a representation of a site or the act of fieldwork, or it may be described as a “translation” (Lucas 2012); that is, the replacement of one material entity (a potsherd within a pit, for example) with another material form (a digital or hand-drawn plan and drawn section with photographs of the pit, along with a washed potsherd, perhaps illustrated, bagged, numbered, boxed, and catalogued in a register). As a dislocation of things from their context of discard and discovery, the archive may be regarded as a process of loss; but in viewing the archive as a material entity in its own right, the process of dislocation during and after fieldwork may also be viewed as the inscription of new meaning open to interpretation. Fieldwork is a collaborative operation that involves a collective of people, materials, instruments, settings, and agencies. These combine to both enable and constrain the conduct and remit of fieldwork, and perhaps also in some cases the direction of fieldwork narrative. Differing agencies may authorize, accredit, and legitimize fieldwork. Permissions, standards, guidelines, and financial commitments are implicated in the fieldwork process via consultation with communities, local authorities, government ministries, heritage bodies, donors, lenders, or grant-awarding bodies, as well as academy and industry representation. Fieldwork is therefore not practiced outside of society, but is firmly integrated with the complexities of its problems and possibilities. As much as fieldwork is conducted within the network of broader society, so too is it a social practice that encompasses a collective of multiple voices. The use of new media, onsite databases, and individual field diaries has been integrated into a number of field research designs as a means to record processes of interpretation and documentation, both of individual and collective fieldworkers, these ephemeral moments otherwise being lost. Highlighting the collaborative nature of fieldwork entails an ethical motive, aimed towards a democratization of the interpretative process, from the ground up. The issue of multivocality in fieldwork has strengthened the growth of community-led initiatives that have emerged through concerns regarding the social value of archaeology and the ownership of narratives about the past, particularly in local settings. Development of these issues in field research design has benefitted greatly from postcolonial discourses. These have focused upon the value of fieldwork in contexts where local participants belong to cultural backgrounds notably different and largely incommensurate with that of the fieldwork team. A range of narratives arising by host and guest during fieldwork may reflect different views on the nature of heritage or distinction in the value placed upon archaeology and the priorities to which it may contribute. An example of fieldwork conducted with one of Kenya’s Samburu communities illustrates an instance in which collaboration that embraces such differences of view can lead to innovative outcomes of knowledge production (Straight et al. 2015). This comprised the excavation of a stone burial cairn by a team of international scientists and the local community, structured through a triage study of cultural, biological, and archaeological anthropology. It was found that the event of the excavation itself, as well as the gradual revealing of the site’s excavated contents, inhabited a range of competing priorities among the team and the broader community and, importantly, generated a variety of open-ended narratives, included in which was the challenge of articulating the complexities of the fieldwork in a range of formats, including publication. SEE ALSO: Archaeological Record; Assemblage; Burial Excavation; Digital Media in Archaeology; Experiment in Archaeology; Field Survey; Heritage: Nonwestern Understandings; Heritage and Community Archaeology; Interpretation; Philosophy of Science; Sampling Theory; Statistics in Archaeology; Value or Significance A R CH A E O L O G I CA L F I E L D WO R K REFERENCES Andrews, Gill A., John C. Barrett, and John S. C. Lewis. 2000. “Interpretation Not Record: The Practice of Archaeology.” Antiquity 74: 525–30. DOI:10.1017/ S0003598X00059871. Binford, Lewis. 1964. “A Consideration of Archaeological Research Design.” American Antiquity 29: 425–41. DOI:10.2307/277978. Carver, Martin. 2011. Making Archaeology Happen: Design Versus Dogma. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Evans, Christopher, Jonathan Tabor, and Marc Vander Linden. 2014. “Making Time Work: Sampling Floodplain Artefact Frequencies and Populations.” Antiquity 88: 241–58. DOI:10.1017/S0003598X0005033X. Hodder, Ian. 1999. The Archaeological Process. Oxford: Blackwell. 5 Lucas, Gavin. 2001. Critical Approaches to Fieldwork. Contemporary and Historical Archaeological Practice. London: Routledge. Lucas, Gavin. 2012. Understanding the Archaeological Record. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Olsen, Bjønar, Michael Shanks, Timothy Webmoor, and Christopher Whitmore. 2012. Archaeology: The Discipline of Things. Berkeley: University of California Press. Straight, Belinda, Paul J. Lane, Charles E. Hilton, and Musa Letua. 2015. “‘It was Maendeleo that Removed Them’: Disturbing Burials and Reciprocal Knowledge Production in a Context of Collaborative Archaeology.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21: 391–418. DOI:10.1111/14679655.12212.