Archaeologists Make the Past Boring

Sara Perry:

The editors of the magazine Current Archaeology (1973:163) once provocatively wrote that “Archaeologists have no Soul.” I understand them to mean that the moment archaeologists are involved in the public representation of the archaeological record (in this case, its visual representation), they usually suck the life out of it. That is, they tend to dispute every interpretative effort that others attempt to invest in the data; they often work to quash expressive detail from the interpretation owing to a concern for ‘getting it wrong’; and they thus reduce the representation to nothing more than vapid accounting. Basically, they obliterate the human from human history, which can then lead their potential audiences to look elsewhere—e.g., fantastical movies, games, comics, books—for more inspired representations. As an archaeologist, I feel the need to contest the argument that we have no soul, but I also know that archaeologists can be paralysed by the uncertainty of their datasets, reluctant to take any risks with the interpretations.

She complains that when she has tried to involve her students in interpretation, their work is reviewed by other other archaeologists, nervous managers, professionals interpreters, and so on,

the creative spirit and impetus for innovative, theoretically-informed experimentation with interpretation is eradicated. For students in particular, at each turn they are questioned by archaeologists about where they’ve located their data, why they would feel comfortable stretching it in different ways and taking liberties with its analysis, how they’re going to make it fit the limited publication/presentation options available to them, how they’ll reach the biggest audience possible, and how they’re going to ensure it stays accurate, ‘true’, immune to misinterpretation by others. In being cross-examined as such, they are effectively worn down into conformity, left replicating existing systems that simply repeat a series of lifeless facts.

Amen to that. The chance of getting something wrong in an imaginative reconstruction of the past has to be weighed against the certainty that a presentation defensible in every detail will chase the public away. And what good is science if we don't tell people about it? And no, technical articles written in what one of my friends calls "Arch-Bark" don't count.