The idea for slow archaeology came to me on my way to one of these regular archaeology and technology conference that emerged as Mediterranean archaeologists come to terms with the rapid introduction of high-tech tools to their discipline. The conference was at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in late February and my flights chased an early spring snowstorm across the eastern United States. I suffered the expected travel delays before experiencing a harrowing ride from Hartford airport to the UMass campus. As I wiled away the time in crowded airports and as a sometimes terrified passenger, I worked hard to suppress my expectation that travel should be seamless, instantaneous, and easy, and, instead, focused on experience of travel itself. The characters present in airports, the sparkling blanket of wet snow, and the impressive driving skills of my Australian colleague as he navigated the slippery roads of rural Massachusetts. It took a snow storm for me to slow down and pay attention to my environment. During a normal trip in which everything works smoothly our motions become mechanical complements to the requirements of travel in the industrial age.
The paper that I planned to deliver at this conference was my standard faire. It focused on the uneven impact of technology on archaeology by comparing the digital workflows employed by large projects to those used by smaller, less wealthy project. Large projects could leverage human and technical infrastructure to develop slick, bespoke applications designed to streamline in-field data collection. These well-funded and well-resourced projects have pioneered the use of iPads, drones, 3D imaging technologies, and elaborately integrated databases and geographic information systems. In most cases, these projects had the most to gain from the use of technology because they generated the most archaeological data each season. To do so, these projects leveraged complex organization and diverse personnel on the ground. Coordinating the various tasks taking place, the people, and the data from the various aspects of these projects provides immediate benefits. An increasingly digital workflow frees project directors or field directors to juggle the range of varied tasks that managing a large archaeological project requires from basic logistics to personality conflicts that regularly prevent them from understanding, supervising, and guiding teams in the field or in the trench. The varied pressures and responsibilities associated with directing a modern archaeological project places a greater premium on collecting standardized, high-resolution data from each step in the excavation process so that the directors could understand a cohesive dataset when the time for analysis begins in earnest, after the field seasons end. In other words, technology benefits excavation practices that involve documenting space and activities through a series of spatially and chronologically separate tasks. Working Draft. Do not cite without permission. Slow Archaeology September 2 Draft
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Smaller projects, in contrast, tend to enjoy a rather more integrated workflow as fewer people attend to more of the tasks that take place during a project. As a result, they lack the economies of scale enjoyed by technological development at larger projects, but at the same time are better suited to allowing project directors day-to-day involvement in the archaeological processes. Smaller projects often provide a more immediate and embodied connection between archaeological fieldwork and archaeological knowledge because those responsible for interpreting the results of fieldwork, in most cases the project directors, are intimately involved in fieldwork itself. Of course, this approach has drawbacks in terms of efficiency as a smaller number of project participants often wear many hats over the course of the field day, but at the same time, this approach to fieldwork resists the impatient and fragmented practices of the 20th century industrial routine and replaces it with the integrated life of craft. The loss of efficiency, however, like my weather disrupted travel, served as a kind of break on the archaeological process. By having to personally engage in every aspect of the archaeological process, small project directors interrupt efficiency and are drawn into the relationship between field practice and knowledge production. This relationship represents the heart of slow archaeology which draws attention to archaeological practice as an meticulous, integrated craft that resists the mechanized pressure of the assembly line.
Slow archaeology emphasizes archaeology as a craft through an attentiveness to the entire process of field work, and challenges the fragmented perspectives offered by archaeological workflows influenced by our own efficient, industrialized age. While recognizing that craft and industrial approaches to archaeology are not mutually exclusive in the dirty realities of fieldwork, the last half-century or more has tended to emphasizes an industrial approach to archaeologic practice at the expensive of a more holistic approach associated with pre-industrial production. As with the slow movement elsewhere in contemporary society, the slow movement in archaeology seeks to critically consider the impact of industrialized practices on how we produce knowledge about our world.
The influences on disciplinary archaeological practices are clear. The discipline developed at the intersection of the longterm industrial influences that formed the modern American university and was advanced by quantitative practices that encourage increasingly regularized dataset from field work. These trends have benefited the field and the knowledge archaeologists produce by aligning it with dominant scientific paradigms, but have side effects that run the risk of becoming only more exaggerated as we leverage technology to increase our efficiency in the field in response to limitations imposed by permitting agencies and funding. At risk is the human aspect of archaeological fieldwork and the ability of an individual in the space of the field to scrutinize, interpret, and document objects, places, and landscapes in a synthetic way.
The Speed of Disciplinary Knowledge Production
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3 The discipline of archaeology has looked to industrial practices and methods since the 19th century. Heinrich Schliemann, for example, funded his work at Troy and Mycenae through his former life as an industrialist and brought industrial organization to his excavations. Academic archaeology, however, saw the full development of the professional discipline alongside the emergence of industrialized academic disciplines in the modern university. In this context, industrial practice and professional archaeology are inseparable both chronologically and institutionally. The university developed systematic ways to educate young adults with courses arranged across disciplines to build key skills, provide professional credentials, and produce productive contributors to American society. While variation existed across universities, over the course of the late 19th and early 20th century, many oriented their curriculum toward the challenge of providing credentials for the growing body of professionals required by industry and our increasingly specialized society. This desire for specialization found its most extreme manifestation in the logic of the assembly line which assigned individuals to perform single, exceedingly limited tasks over and over. Through coordinating the hyper-specialized actions of dozens of individuals, the assembly line produced a single product as efficiently as possible. Higher education employed a similar approach to producing educated individuals by dividing up the process of education among various specialized experts in particular disciplines.
These historical industrial influences on higher education have incurred resistance, of course. Disciplines like history, art history, literature, anthropology, and archaeology have periodically articulated their work as craft undertakings in order to present a persistent countercurrent to industrial models of education and knowledge production. In fact, the course I taught for years to new history majors at the University of North Dakota was titled: "The Historians' Craft". Recent resistance to the audit culture surrounding university education has pushed cultural anthropologists to emphasized the holistic, embodied, and immersive experience of fieldwork. Scholars of art and literature historians have championed the open-ended and contemplative process of close reading or the patient, unhurried examination of a work of art. All these approaches to disciplinary knowledge have a few things in common. They resists the fragmentation of tasks common to industrial practices and ground disciplinary knowledge in the willingness to embrace the slow process of experience. As a result, these disciplines have generally ignored calls for efficiency and embraced practices and knowledge derived from careful examining, close reading, and contemplation.
Archaeologists have looked beyond contemporary practice to emphasize the roots of their discipline craft practices. Michael Shanks and Matthew Johnson, for example, have explored the roots of archaeology in 18th century traditions of historical perambulations, landscape painting, and literature. The historical English countryside came alive not through the systematic treatments by specialist scholars, but through contemplative encounters mediated through art and literature as much as efforts to describe monuments or historical landscapes. These pre-industrial approaches to the landscape continued to cast a shadow across the discipline and serve as a counter weight to the Working Draft. Do not cite without permission. Slow Archaeology September 2 Draft
4 influenced grounded in industrial practices. In a famous article from 1996, Shanks and Marxist archaeologist Randall Maguire stress the latent significance of craft in the field of archaeology and emphasize the creativity of the archaeologists work where hand, heart, and mind are combined.
The advent of stratigraphic excavation in the early 20th century played a key roll in rendering craft a latent influence in the discipline. Statigraphic excavation provided a key opportunity to adapt the discipline to industrial practices. The identification and removal of deposits - called strata - and the systematic arrangement of these strata in relation to one another structured the archaeological record in a way that allowed for chronological and spatial descriptions of past depositional events. The work of dividing the excavated world into distinct strata paralleled the use of fragmentation as a tool of efficiency in industrial practice. Working from strata to strata across a trench, stratigraphic excavation collapsed the complexity of time and space into defined slices. Each strata received careful documentation in notebooks including textual descriptions, illustration, and with the spread of affordable photography, photographs. Just as the excavator parsed the stratigraphic record into discrete parts, specialists studied artifacts located in each strata. These objects often help to assign either relatively or, in best case scenario, absolute dates to each level, to associate a function with the space, or to describe the event that created it. As archaeology and excavation has become more complex, it has spawned and relied upon a greater group of specialists to assist in identifying and analyzing the material present in each strata. The largest projects now rely on dozens of object specialists who work in parallel with excavators, wheel-barrow men, trench supervisors, area supervisors, field directors, ceramicists, bioarchaeologists, numismatists, to produce archaeological knowledge. Both the assumptions surrounding stratigraphic excavation and the specialists who support it encourages the maintenance of industrial discipline in order to a fragmented data set that might be re-integrated at a later point.
If the principals of stratigraphic excavation and the nature of specialized disciplinary education provided a methodological and institutional context for an industrial archaeology, the archaeological interest in efficiency also derives from the more direct engagement with the fast pace of the late capitalist economy. This is most apparent in the rise of post-war rise of cultural resource management firms which conduct excavations and survey on contracts ahead of major construction projects. They constantly negotiate the pressures of construction deadlines, their own need to document archaeological deposits according to professional standards, and profitability. The influence, in particular, of the British CRM industry on Mediterranean field practices cannot be overstated as many Old World archaeologists have spent time working for firms in the U.K. while pursuing academic degrees and careers. This productive cross pollination has infused Mediterranean archaeology with more efficient practices at the very moment when the expense of doing field work and increasingly limited permit restriction has reduced the amount of time archaeological research teams have in the field. Just as the economic pressures on manufacturing and construction has spurred innovation, these same pressures have produced a more efficient and streamlined archaeological industry. Working Draft. Do not cite without permission. Slow Archaeology September 2 Draft
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The historic pressures on the discipline have exerted a consistent influence on field practices, and the rise in CRM archaeology has brought archaeology even closer in line with pace of capitalism. The remainder of this essay considers some of the specific ways that archaeology has begun to change as fieldwork has become distributed among specialists and the workflow standardized and streamlined. In particular, the shift toward industrialized, distributed, field work has changed how we articulate embodied knowledge in our discipline. Fragmented and digitally mediated practices contrast in many ways with a craft approach to archaeology mediated by forms of embodied knowledge that forge a strong connection between the individual, the series of tasks necessary to produce an object, and the results of this work. Among archaeologists, knowledge in this form derives from physical contact with the soil, the landscape, and artifacts, and it resists the fragmentary and systematized organization of contemporary fieldwork and its attendant methodologies. Embodied knowledge eliminates the divisions between systematic data collection field and disciplinary knowledge by privileging practices that make time for deliberate interpretation during the encounter with artifacts, landscapes, and strata in an archaeological context.
Digital Practices in Archaeological Fieldwork
The connection between industrial efficiency and organization of academic knowledge production does not, of course, preclude a slow and deliberate apprehension of the world. The injection of technology into the equation, however, has served as a tool for accelerating the pace of our increasingly limited time in the field. The increased efficiency introduced by digital technology has become the most apparent over the past 30 years as the media, technology companies, and archaeologists themselves tout the compelling juxtaposition of futuristic devices and ancient artifacts. Despite the hype, archaeological use of high technology tools to increase field efficiency has roots in the early 20th century, and the gradual encroachment of photography on illustration in the field. By the late 20th century, microprocessors powered a new generation of technologies that ranged from digital surveying tools to personal computers, digital cameras, and, most recently, mobile devices that promised to streamline various aspects of the archaeological workflow. These tools simplified the way that data could be collected in the field, but also contributed to the continued fragmentation of data into standardized bits destined for reassembly by archaeologists once the field season ended.
Archaeologists first introduced photography to excavation in the 1880s and by the early 20th century photography was standard technique for documenting trenches. Photographys primary benefit was that it allowed archaeologists to document their work more quickly because even the complexity of producing early photographic prints presented a less onerous alternative to hand illustration. Initial hopes that it would make obsolete all occasions for illustration soon proved unfounded, and the two practices continued side-by-side throughout 20th-century fieldwork. Even as inexpensive film cameras became more widespread and, over the last two decades, high-quality Working Draft. Do not cite without permission. Slow Archaeology September 2 Draft
6 digital cameras, illustration retained a place within the archaeological process as archaeologists sketched each stratigraphic context or professional illustrators and architects made scale drawings of objects and detailed plans of architecture. The act of illustrating has represented a key moment when the archaeological process slows down, careful observation prevails, and the body of the illustrator interposes itself between the space of excavation and the space of documentation. In many projects some of the responsibility for illustration falls on the trench supervisors, and by encouraging excavators to illustrate the contexts that they dig, we locate part of the productive, interpretative process at the trench side. Whenever excavators illustrate, they evoke craft production through their deliberate pace and the integration of excavation, illustration, and the interpretative work of producing archaeological knowledge.
Alongside illustrating, archaeologists traditionally recorded textual descriptions of their trenches or areas in notebooks. Through much of the 20th century, notebooks were idiosyncratic to the individual archaeologists and often became their personal property (or the property of the project). Even today, archaeologists refer to particular notebooks by the name of the excavators: Blegens Notebooks. Our understanding, then, of past excavations often relies on the ability and willingness of an excavator to describe what they saw in their trench or across a landscape. The most elaborate notebooks featured illustrations of objects, landscapes, and trenches as well as photographs and lengthy and sometimes colorful descriptions. Like the act of illustration, the task of recording a trench in a notebook requires the archaeologist to slow down and translate what he or she is seeing into a deliberate description. These descriptions are necessarily interpretative as they mediate between the process of excavating and the product of that process. The vivid descriptions left by master excavators make clear the relationship between their own decision making and the archaeological reality they uncover. The physical act of writing in a notebook parallels the act of illustrating in that it slows the process of excavation down and forces the archaeologist to integrate their observations on process and interpretation at trench side. As recent psychology has argued, the very act of writing slows our mind to think through the information that we observe more carefully and critically.
Illustration and notebook writing located the moment of archaeological knowledge production at the edge of the trench, required a deliberate slowing of pace for interpretation, and reinforced the integrated, craft approach to archaeological work. In the 1960s, however, the move toward quantification across the humanities and social sciences spurred a greater interest in collecting data in standardized, systematic, and finely-parsed ways. This finely parsed data could be then quantified using the growing power of computers. This move toward grounding archaeology in quantitative methods was part of a larger movement known as processual or new archaeology that looked to draw the discipline closer to the scientific approaches favored by the social sciences. This shift introduced a greater attention to methodology within the discipline and recognized that the methods through which archaeologists produced data required more rigorous documentation if they are to archaeological data are to provide a solid basis for scientific knowledge. As a result, archaeologists Working Draft. Do not cite without permission. Slow Archaeology September 2 Draft
7 interested in these approaches engaged in vigorous debates focusing on not only the best approaches to a new generation of quantifiable archaeological problems, but also the best field practices for collecting data.
Intensive pedestrian survey, which is my archaeological specialty, grew to increased prominence during the heyday of new processual archaeology. In the Mediterranean world, and particularly in Greece and Cyprus, survey archaeologists developed more systematic approaches to the traditional practice of landscape archaeology. Landscape archaeology is one of the oldest forms of systematically understanding our historical environment. The Romantics of the 18th century documented their world by walking the countryside with notebook in hand filling their landscape with romantic ruins and bucolic scenes. Throughout the 20th century archaeologists followed in their footsteps filling journal pages with descriptions of their perambulations across ancient battlefield, discovering hilltop sanctuaries, and confirming ancient itineraries. By the final decades of the 20th century intensive pedestrian survey archaeologists, inclined their head more sharply toward the ground and began to count artifacts on the surface. This fixation on objects in the soil matrix led us to divide the landscape into small plots and to produce meticulous counts and samples of the material on the ground. These practices have produced millions of artifacts and nearly as many articles describing methods, presenting descriptions, and offering analysis of these new artifactual landscapes. By the 21 st century, these practices covered the maps of Greece, Italy, and Cyprus with computer generated dots, grids, and gradients.
To generate this high-resolution, quantitative archaeological data, survey archaeologists worked to make the archaeological process more efficient by streamline in field data collection. Survey archaeologists introduced forms to replace free-form notebooks and to facilitate transferring the granular data to computer spreadsheets and databases. Each survey was a little different, but in general for each unit, there was a single form. On the form, the team leader described the location, ground cover, vegetation, soil type, as well as the number of artifacts counted by the members of the team. The team leader inclined his or her head toward a clipboard in the field as a team of field walkers arranged at fixed intervals walked across the landscape counting and collecting objects from the surface. These field walkers looked up at the end of their swaths to report their counts and finds to a team leader who dutifully recorded them on the form before arranging for the walkers to set out again on the next unit. This data eventually found its way into a computer under the supervision of a data manager or a digital archaeology expert. Project directors analyze and project the data as statistical tables or across a map with detailed methodological treatment providing contextual. The perambulating landscape archaeologist has given way to carefully arranged data collectors who move across the countryside with an eye toward efficiency and send their reports along the archaeological production line to data managers and GIS specialists.
Over the last decade or so of excavation, the trench notebook has slowly disappeared to be replaced first by forms and then by handheld computers and tablets. The empty space of the gridded Working Draft. Do not cite without permission. Slow Archaeology September 2 Draft
8 excavation notebook page has given way to the orderly forms of the project database. This change has standardized our understanding of each trench and facilitated comparison between excavation areas. More importantly, these changes also increased efficiency throughout the system by streamlining data collection at the edge of the trench and synthesize after the season ended. The trench supervisor has, in turn, started to move from the position of synthetic analyst to a recorder of observations in a form. The craft of trench supervision, grounded as it were on careful observation and relatively free forms of writing and illustration that gave voice to his or her analysis, has given way to a more systemized approach that moves discrete bits of excavation data along to project directors. Just as the team leader on an intensive pedestrian survey has come to represent a cog in a complex workflow that often ends on a laptop computer in the directors office, the trench supervisors form or digital notebook allows for more efficient disaggregation of the excavation process for study.
The art of illustration is likewise undergoing substantial changes. Even with the widespread and inexpensive circulation of first film and then digital cameras, project directors and trench supervisors continue to insist that the trenches and artifacts undergo regular illustration by hand. The substantial expense and expertise required to operate digital surveying equipment and 3D laser imaging devices in an efficient and consistent way ensured that these high-tech tools made only modest inroads to archaeological projects in the Mediterranean. Low-cost, and even lower-skill 3D imaging tools based on structure-from-motion digital photography, however, is poised to change this paradigm. Over the last decade, archaeologists have become increasingly interested in software that can turn any digital camera into a 3D imaging tool, and several projects, including mine on Cyprus, have used this to reduce our dependence on the time-consuming process of illustration. The implications of this change, however, are far from clear. As painstaking as illustration can be, it represented one of the last activities that compelled the trench supervisor to slow down to observe the trench and to integrate stratigraphy, architecture, and artifacts in the context of the excavated space. Taking a series of digital photographs and subjecting them to an automated process at a later time and in a different place, fragments archaeological knowledge spatially and temporally in the name of efficiency.
Over time, the archaeologist has become less the interpreter of the trench or the landscape and more the data collector. By collecting data in the field the archaeologist transfers the place of analysis from the side of the trench or the landscape to the laptop computer, the laboratory, and the office. Field work become more fragmented as stratigraphic levels and survey units increasingly represent the primary level of analysis and the goal of fieldwork has become documenting these fragments as thoroughly as possible for later study.
Toward a Slow Archaeology
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9 Archaeology as a discipline is both historically linked to industrial practices and continuing toward an even more mechanized and technological future. The rapidly-vanishing elements of its earlier craft roots, however, represent more than a nostalgic link to a romanticized past. The preservation of craft practices in archaeology, like the academy at large, reflects our enduring commitment to localized, embodied, humanized knowledge. When we reduce field archaeologists to data collectors and the knowledge gleaned from the field to atomized data, we both temporally and physically displace our encounter with archaeological landscapes from the field to to the lab or office where the disparate parts are (re-)assembled into a new, systematically produced whole.
To some extent, this displacement is unavoidable in our modern age. The limits imposed by governmental agencies, the pressures of reduced funding, and expectations of a discipline will continue to privilege efficiency in the field. At the same time, our failure to engage the landscape while in the field represents an equally egregious oversight. A close colleague recalled having to return to the field for several additional seasons of work after completing a three year campaign of intensive pedestrian survey because he needed to look up from his clipboard to experience the landscape. His experiences are not unique. Recent work using least-cost-path computer models produced by Geographic Information System software nevertheless require old-fashioned, boots on the ground, truthing expeditions to see if the constellation of variables pushed through computer algorithms resulted in routes consistent with human experience in the landscape. Nowhere is this more eloquently expressed than in a recent volume by Michael Given and colleagues based on their large-scale fieldwork in Cyprus. He reminds his readers that their systematic work to produce landscapes is only one way to read archaeological space and that Cypriot farmers have walked the very same fields and seen the same pot sherds for generations. The worlds created from the crunch under foot and plough have an immediate relationship with out own conception of the archaeological space only so far as we hope that archaeology can reconstruct a past filled with actual individuals who make decisions based on their own experience with the material world.
One summer, my colleague and I spent two weeks painstaking illustrating a field stone fortification in the Greek countryside. The site was on a small hill that provided views of the coastline, narrow valleys, and neglected paths that marked out routes and arable land in a fractured and arid landscape. Our work illustrating the site was painful. The site was hot, filled with bugs, and we had both been sick with a dreaded summer cold. It did, however, force us to look carefully at the walls for hours on end and to notice the subtle techniques that the builders used to promote both stability and a pleasing appearance. Differences in construction style of the various walls helped us to distinguish them chronologically from one another, and the presence a more carefully built and monumental wall along the south side allowed us to argue that it faced the route of approach to the building. These conclusions were not impossible without hand illustration, but producing a measured illustration of unremarkable example of rural architecture from the Hellenistic period slowed us down enough to see more of the human element in this building. In fact, the care we took Working Draft. Do not cite without permission. Slow Archaeology September 2 Draft
10 in illustrating the building paralleled the care the builders took in arranging the stones with the more deliberately constructed south wall attracting more careful attention in our efforts to illustrate.
I spent this past summer watching field teams march systematically across an inland valley in southern Greece. Our efficiency in the field was remarkable, our field teams collected data at a level of unprecedented intensity, and we produced an archaeological map of the area with remarkable detail. At the same time, a project director and I wandered around the landscape. Perching ourselves at prominent places and setting out across fields, streams, and roads we walked across the countryside with our trusted notebooks and observed the relationship between various features shifting kaleidoscopically on our route. Ridges that appeared prominent on our maps blended into surrounding landscapes and low hills marked with whitewashed churches emerged from the tangled lines of the topographic maps. Our walks were deliberate and slow, and constantly under pressure from other responsibilities, but they produced results that were not easy to reconcile with the dominant methods employed by the project. At the same time, these walks did as much to help us understand our landscape as the intensive survey did to quantify it. The two methods reinforced the disconnect between the landscape engaged by the project directors and that experiences by our field teams. Our efforts to encourage field team leaders to look up from their clipboards and forms and take time to understanding their surroundings soon succumbed to the pressures of the daily routine. For our fieldwalkers, the team leaders dictated the pace of field work. The less distracted and more efficient team leaders, the more focused and efficient their field walkers became.
The goal of slow archaeology is to find ways to resist productively the impulse toward efficiency, standardization, and fragmentation in fieldwork by looking to integrated and personal approaches to documenting our engagement with archaeological space and the landscape. In many ways, it follows a larger critique of processual archaeology known unhelpfully as post-processualism. The emphasis here, however, is on the pace of field work as much as its goals. By taking the time to walk, touch, draw, and reflect on what we see while in the field, we take the time to place our own reading of objects, architecture, and the landscape within archaeological space. This yields three main advantages. It has practical advantages of allowing ideas and questions to develop in physical proximity to the places and objects under study. Walking through the Greek countryside following the contours of the ground led us to discover new sites and recognize significant places in the landscape that maps and computer models overlooked. Drawing by hand on site, pushed us to examine architecture (or features in a trench) more deliberately and to observe subtleties that we might otherwise miss in our quest for efficient data collection. On a more theoretical level, slowing down and starting the process of interpretation in the field encourages us to be mindful of the link between our bodies and our understanding of the past. This mindfulness encourages us to recognize our shared humanity with the people from the past who we study. More than that, it pushes back against disciplinary deskilling in which field work becomes data collection and field work dominated by the need for efficiency. By allowing time and space for individuals to understand the significance Working Draft. Do not cite without permission. Slow Archaeology September 2 Draft
11 of their contributions to an archaeological project, we draw more voices to the work of archaeological interpretation and make our discipline both more inclusive and humane.
This does not require that we return to a romantic view of the past or ruins or indulge in idiosyncratic or particularized readings of the material world. After all, disciplinary training the field of archaeology has already informs our practice. No amount of deliberate slowness is likely to overwrite the intellectual or academic questions we bring to our field work, the influence of our university training, the pace of development, and the availability of technology. At the same time, it is worth noting that even these industrial pressures have not succeeded in producing an archaeological universe bereft of individual character. Despite decades of standardized, digitized, and normalized data, Mediterranean archaeologists still struggle to compare data produced by different projects in the region. As a result, it is important to realize that slow practice and a quest for greater efficiency are not fundamentally incompatible. Stratigraphic excavation, for example, has proven optimal for linking archaeological remains to depositional events, and has allowed almost a century of archaeologists to persuasively describe the natural and human processes that create archaeological remains. Building time into field work to prioritize the production of the kind of embodied knowledge that lingers at the fringes of all honest archaeological work provides an opportunity to understand more clearly how we inhabit the worlds we seek to build.
Beyond a Slow Archaeology
This reflection on slow archaeology has relevance beyond practitioners of one particular discipline. Like other facets of the slow movement, my goal has been to speak broadly to how we engage our world by aiming to make space for coherent, deliberate thinking amidst the bustle of a life dictated by efficiency, deadlines, and technological wonders. Like most academics, I reserve a certain skepticism for most big-picture thinkers who look to understand how the world works as an integrated whole. Moreover, I know that the lived world relies on the seamless functioning of many living things, objects, and ideas. A simple trip from my North Dakota home to a conference in Massachusetts represents the uninterrupted synchronization of myriad fast-moving parts from the physical function of the airplane to the automated ticket counters. Only a late winter snowstorm interrupted the seamlessness of everyday life and produce an enforced patience necessary to recognize and comprehend the various flickering fragments that shape our fast-paced existence.
Academic knowledge is by definition specialized and limited. The institutional restraints designed to limit what we can know at one given point is the product of a kind of a traditional of intellectual Taylorism grounded today in the industrial university and reproduced in a curriculum organized to disseminate specialized knowledge. Our view of the real world, however, is not bound by such artificial limits and fragmented perspectives, and as archaeologists we hope to produce a past that exists outside disciplinary knowledge. While the flickering fragments of our technologically mediated world will continue to strobe impatiently before our eyes, we should also take time to Working Draft. Do not cite without permission. Slow Archaeology September 2 Draft
12 maintain a quiet counterpoint by slowing ourselves down and crafting our place in to a cohesive landscape.
Review of Lapadula, Erminia. The Chora of Metaponto 4: The Late Roman Farmhouse at San Biagio. Pp. xiv + 261, figs. 116, tables 15. University of Texas Press, Austin 2012. $75. ISBN 978-0-292-72877-6 (cloth).