Archaeoblogging: Getrennt marschieren – vereint schlagen“?

Doug's Blogarch carnival ends with a final question: "where are you/we going with blogging or would you it like to go?"

I think it is perhaps too early to say "we are going" anywhere at all with archaeoblogging.  It certainly has potential, blogs provide snapshots of various aspects of an archaeologist's approach to issues that rouse him or her. In effect members of the wider public or other areas of the discipline can look over our shoulders, see a bit into the world we inhabit and how we see it. This has particular importance for public outreach, archaeoblogs have the potential of informing those outside the discipline who we are and what we do, and perhaps a little of the why and how. This could be an element of promotion of the discipline, drawing the public inside in a way seldom possible on such a scale as before. That surely has to be beneficial and provide yet another means to communicate with a wider audience. It seems pretty clear that this potential however currently remains pretty much untapped.  For it to be an effective tool for public outreach, it seems to me that we need to consider how for the purpose to meld the rather chaotic ad hoc scribblings into some more strategic form. "Getrennt marschieren – vereint schlagen“. Is that possible?

The ability for an outside audience to see into parts of the inner workings of certain areas of the discipline has of course positive and negative aspects. These are perhaps more visible here, at the interface between two entirely different approaches to the remains of the past, between archaeology and collecting. Two stories emerging last month illustrate most effectively the problems I see all the time.

The first concerns the fuss over the proposed "Nazi War Diggers" series of National Geographic. It was in fact the PACHI blog that first picked this story up from a metal detecting forum and highlighted a few problems, it was shortly afterwards taken up (in many cases also independently) by a number of online commentators, and the uptake, and its implications were such that within two days  the producers felt under pressure to change the tone of their promotional material. A few days of further comment and unanswered questions, and they unexpectedly gave up and cancelled the broadcast. While this may be felt to be some kind of a victory for archaeobloggers, I am not so sure that really is the case. Certainly one factor leading to this decision was the way in which online people were, for once, singing from the same songsheet. I personally suspect the actual problem was more likely to have been, in this case, the nature of the material actually handed over by the production company to NatGeo (perhaps enough of the filmed sequences made a hastily-summoned consultant cringe to make it clear that they could not all be edited out leaving material for four programs, and I suspect that the evasive language that emerged indicates there really were problems in the permissions and professional oversight). As for the chorus of disapproval, note its context. This was an identity thing. A 'band of brothers' (heritage professionals, military archaeologists, bone people) saw their mutual identity challenged by an 'Other' (which I hasten to add was not the 'metal detectorists' involved, but in this case a trust-trashing commercial-exploitation move by an 'educational' TV programme part of the evil Fox media empire).

At the other extreme is the debacle about recording of metal detected finds as a form of surface survey at the beginning of March. Surface survey was (after 'ancient Egypt') my first archaeological love, and readers of my blog will know that I am concerned about the depletion, and the manner of depletion, of the surface record of unexcavated sites by artefact hunting and collecting. It is from that angle that much of my own criticism of UK artefact hunting and the PAS are formulated. Artefact hunters frequently uncomprehendingly stress however that since most of them hoik from the ploughsoil alone and when a site is excavated, archaeologists summarily remove the ploughsoil, it does not matter at all what they take and how from any ploughsoil. This argument stems from the simplistic argument that archaeologists "only dig (things up)" - they only excavate - and ignores the fact that surface survey and non-intrusive methods have a large role to play in the toolkit of modern archaeology. I spent a bit of time trying to explain the logic of the view that we should be striving for either preservation of this surface evidence, or in the case of its removal the highest possible standards in observation and recording as mitigation of the erosion caused. That seems to me to make sense from an archaeological point of view, and I would have thought that most thinking archaeologists would subscribe to such a view. The notion is of course not good news to the UK artefact hunter interested in hastily hoiking the most attractive goodies for their growing collection. Such artefact hunters were therefore very happy to find some other UK archaeologists, not connected to the previous discussion who shared the same careless attitudes to topsoil material. These archaeologists (either oblivious to the online context of the discussion they joined halfway through without checking what it was about, or out of sheer spite and stupidity) earned gratitude and kudos in part of their audience by telling their metal detectorist 'partners' precisely what they wanted to hear, that - that (since archaeologists machine off topsoil when they excavate a site), it does not matter what and how metal detectorists take from it. These are the realities of promoting best practice among artefact hunters, there are many archaeologists for which the phrase has in fact no real meaning. I doubt any of the archaeologists who said these things gave much thought to the fact that on all four sides of the excavation on which their attention is focussed extend outwards cultural landscapes consisting of sites which if they consider investigating them at all would be studied above all on the basis of the nature and extent of the horizontal spreads of artefactual material on the surface. They (or those who come after them) are not going to be able to make anything from the results of such a survey if unknown people have been taking unknown quantities of unknown types of material from unknown parts of those scatters without any useful records being made. That is not conservation or site 'management', it is information loss. That they did or did not take such issues into count before issuing some unqualified statements lapped up by metal detectorist eager for a get-out clause does not concern the latter. But is that really the best modern archaeological thinking can offer in the UK?

The problem is that one can blog as much as one likes, write however much sense or stupidity, put however much effort into writing something which forms a logical whole, or go for a quick laugh or provocative one-liner, the results are at present more or less the same. British archaeology has not matured to using this kind of discussion to any significant degree to investigate the full richness of the discussion on the treatment of the remains of the past.

Where there is an "Other" (Fox media) to unite against, no problem. Everybody and their uncle willingly climbs on the bandwaggon. When there is a methodological (or ideological one might say) problem to be examined, and especially one that might bring one in contact with metal detectorists (a group of people on whom opinions are very divided in British archaeology), then British archaeologists are not at all keen to go very deeply into the subject by looking at what others are saying. And if they do, they are far more inclined to adopt the tactics of the metal detectorist (dismiss and ignore that which does not fit with the easiest way out) than actually engage in discussion. In that sense, in my opinion, archaoblogging is going nowhere within archaeology, its value is however in highlighting the issues that archaeologists will not tackle and getting people outside the charmed circles of jobsworthism asking why that is and what that says about the shape of archaeology today.