Slow

Three Things Thursday: A Warm Take on Magnifica Humanitas

Like many people, I’ve been reading Pope Leo XIV’s first Encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. It is long, it is expansive, and in many ways, it is daunting. Time will tell whether it is a worthy successor to Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891), but it certainly continues (explicitly) in that tradition. 

There are already quite a few “hot takes” from various commentators on this document and I am sure that folks much more learned in matters of theology, “Social Doctrine“, and papal politics will have more thoughtful takes on this over the next year or so. I offer here a few warm takes on the letter that mainly focused on parts of the text that resonated most deeply with me. To be clear, I’m not Catholic and don’t have any particular faith commitment to this document, but it still struck me as a remarkable statement that speaks to many issues that haunt our contemporary society.

Thing the First

Over the last few months, I lost my father and this week we decided that our 13 year old “yellow dog” is suffering too much. Fortunately, my dad liked dogs and because he was willing to give Milo “butt scratches,” Milo liked my dad. I’m sure that Milo and my dad will find each other in the next life. (This sentiment is probably not theologically justifiable, by the way!) 

One of the points that resonated with me the most in Magnifica Humanitas is how human interaction is not something that benefits from efficiency, optimization, or improvement. When my brother and I visited my dad before he passed, he was brought to tears that we came to see him and wanted to spend time with him. If you know anything about dogs (and particularly our “yellow dog”) most of what they want is companionship (and treats) whether this took the form of just being in the room, going for walks, or a vigorous game of “ram ball.”

The genuine experience of time together is not something that AI can simulate and it is not something that can be performed more efficiently. It is irreducibly human and forms the fabric of our society and extends at least as far as our companion species (although this is not something that the Pope discusses). For Leo XIV, technological developments cannot be just if they lead people to feel alienated, lonely, and isolated through either false promises, shallow simulations, or material requirements that promote slow violence that rends the social fabric of communities.

Thing the Second

Leo XIV evokes the idea of the dignity of work drawing heavily on Leo XIII’s thought (especially in Rerum Novarum, but elsewhere as well). I have to admit that I had not considered how this concept fit into my formulations of “slow” in archaeology (or in academia more broadly). On the one hand, I had recognized that efficiency often drove scholars to race to keep up with ever accelerating expectations and standards and that these often measured accomplishments on the basis of quantifiable products (publications, citations, FTEs, or whatever) rather than growth experienced through process. On the other hand, I had not thought about how this growing sense of manufactured urgency and the shift from process to product dehumanized work itself. 

Magnifica Humanitas got me thinking more about how the tools we use carry with them certain social expectations that erode the dignity of work by accelerating the time when social and moral reflection take place. Many tools — particularly AI — see process as something to be optimized rather than enjoyed, savored, or celebrated. Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical calls out this reasoning and makes clear the process is what imparts work with dignity and allows for growth by making work human. When humans do work at the pace of the machine or do work to support the machine for the sake of the machine, this deprives the work of dignity.

The most scathing insight in this document is that those responsible for creating a society where optimizing process deprives work of dignity are morally responsible for the results of their actions. It is not possible to hide behind “the market” or “capital” as an excuse for advancing anti-human ideas. As humans, we have a unique kind of agency and as a result, unique responsibilities.

Thing the Third

Part of the genius of Leo XIV’s sprawling encyclical is that its structure, content, and scope make it resistant to contemporary reading practices. Much like Augustine’s Confessions, this is not a text susceptible to executive summary or other forms of streamlined digestion. Running it through your average LLM powered AI bot overlooks the nuanced interplay between the various arguments that relies, in no small part, on understanding the development of the church’s social doctrine over the past 135 years. Indeed, the interplay between Rerum Novarum and Magnifica Humanitas alone as well as scripture, Augustine’s work, and the writing of Leo’s immediate predecessors ensures that this text is not reducible to a series of bullet points, but rather a gateway to further engagement. The text is not linear. It is discursive and held together by centuries-old conversations, debates, and texts. It’s the kind of text that will draw a reader back to it multiple times and resist our society’s need for efficient, tidy, and conclusive engagement. 

In this way, Leo’s text resists the very forces that he (and his predecessors) see at play in the world. In a world that celebrates efficiency often at the expense of humanity, Leo has provided us with a very inefficient, but also very human text. 

Three Things Thursday: Reading Byung-Chul Han

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve read some Byung-Chul Han particularly his book The Scent of Time (2017). This was prompted by my reading of Arturo Ribeiro’s article in Shadow Archaeology which cites Han pretty extensively.

Han’s arguments about fragmentation and time will be particularly useful for the revisions of my book, Archaeology, Photography, Oil. Workforce Housing in the Bakken. 

Here are three things that I’m finding useful in Han.

Thing the First

Han agrees with any number of other commentators that the modern world is fragmented. He calls this “dyschronicity”. For Han, time literally is falling out of sync with itself. The absence of rhythm or structure to time causes events, experiences, and moments to “whizz about” randomly and in fragments that lack duration. The result is that time loses character; much in the way that scholars have noted the rise of modern non-places (e.g. shopping malls, hotels, airports, et c.), time has lost what makes it distinct or, in Han’s terms, its scent. The reasons for this are varied and complex, but mostly have to do with the collapse of narrative. Because there is no narrative, there can’t be goals or purpose to the passage of time. It moves endlessly and aimlessly causing modern humans to no longer work collectively (motivated, say, by a shared narrative) toward or goal but to work constantly as it is no longer possible to discern when a task is complete (or even the nature of a task itself). In fact, the absence duration and narrative is crucial for the expansive view of the contemporary that characterizes archaeology of the contemporary world. The time of the archaeologist, the event, the experience, and the object are all discrete and distinct. The flattening of time into an ontologically indistinct present opens the future to new relationships with the present and past.

Thing the Second

The decline of narrative is particularly useful for my work because I was drawn to Benjamin’s skepticism surrounding narrative as a motivating agent for contemporary life. Benjamin saw narratives, particularly those wielded by the fascist right, but also embedded in capitalism, as particularly toxic. They resulted in not only narrow minded determinism characteristic of totalitarianism, but also the “cruel optimism” (to use Berlant’s term) of capitalism that drives the worker to an individual future that no amount of work will ever achieve. 

For Han, the fragmentation of time isn’t a cure to the potential domination of the narrative, but the result of narrative collapsed (which perhaps has a parallel with the collapse of authority). Narrative collapse means that it is unlikely that new narratives will emerge that are compelling or meaningful. (And the current political landscape seems to confirm this observation). Instead, we are left with a world devoid of narrative and therefore incapable of any sustained notion of time as duration. As a result, the contemporary becomes an all encompassing space for the juxtaposition of endlessly fragmented presents. Work, data points, information, and images do not lead anywhere but whizz about in the continuous contemporary. 

Thing the Third

Han regards the collapse of narrative and the fragmentation of time and experience not as a crisis that we must overcome through the imposition of a new narratives. There is also no way to “work” ourselves out of this situation through more frenetic efforts to organize or arrange experiences as they whizzed about. Instead, Han proposed that we embrace the potential of fragments as objects of contemplation. Each fragment contains its own time, its own experience, and its own “scent.” Through contemplation, one can recognize the “scent of time” and restore duration as well as our capacity to recognize the relationship between moments and objects. This allows us to subvert the endless and pointless activity of work which leads nowhere and accomplishes nothing and replace it with a renewed connection to existence. Han leans on Heidegger’s notion of dwelling here.

For my work as an archaeologist, the value of Han’s notion of contemplation three fold. First, my project focuses on images — the quintessential expression of modern fragmentation — and Han offers a lens through which to produce meaning from photographs without reducing them to evidence for an argument or points in a narrative. 

Second, this allows me to understand the images as contemporary with the situations that they produce (that is the objects, relationships, and conditions present in the photographs), with the time that they were taken, and with the viewer. This expansive view of the contemporary creates a temporal space for the interplay between fragments and restores a sense of duration to the present without re-engaging with the notion of narrative. It allows for more open-ended and expansive juxtapositions that produce not just meaning, but significance and understanding. This process encourages us to slow down. 

Finally, by presenting images as fragments of experience, it deliberately undermines narratives of production which serve to obfuscate the profoundly unproductive routine of work. Photographs capture the fragmented experience of the cycle of booms and busts, the endless demands of extraction, the experience of life in a workforce housing site in the Bakken oil patch, the sense of precarity, displacement, and contingency. Photographs not only express the material reality of non-narrative existence, but by encouraging contemplative study subverts extractive practices that produce (or assume) narrative.

Teaching Thursday: Getting a Class to Slow Down

Usually when I think about revising a class, I think about content or even organization. This semester, I’m trying a slightly different approach and trying to change the classroom atmosphere.

As I noted last week, one of the vexing issues that I’ve been facing is post-COVID attendance. For whatever reason, students have become increasingly ambivalent about coming to class. This ambivalence undermines the group work that is central to what I do in my 100 level survey. 

This week, we started the first of a series of installation assignments where students have to think about how to organize themselves to complete a series of assignments. The first of these assignments asks the students to create a glossary for a chapter in the textbook. This not only requires the students to read the textbook carefully, but also to figure out what is important and what is not. I tell the students that their glossary should not be a series of factoids. Instead, it should be a series of related terms, individuals, places, and events that produces an outline of the chapter for a reader. 

The students have a tendency to “divide and conquer” an assignment like this. They want to get on with the program by assigning each of the terms to a student and then combining them in the end. This is an efficient way to complete the task, but it often produces lists of random facts that do not crate an outline of the chapter. In past semesters, I’ve urged students to consider this outcome before they started to work, but left it up to them to figure out how to resolve it. Most groups chose to produce a random list, turn it into me, and then read my feedback and revise accordingly.

This semester — with my emphasis on the classroom as community — I’m going to encourage the students to slow down. Talk to one another first and come up with a list of terms, individuals, places, and events. Then, if they want, they can go and write individually, but after they have written as individuals, they need to reconvene as a group and read each other’s work. While recommending this process is one thing, encouraging the students to slow down and actually engage with it is another. I’m vaguely tempted to have a little in-class quiz where I ask the students to provide feedback on their colleague’s work. At the same time, I want to make sure that the class doesn’t devolve into a series of short assessments designed to condition behavior. Instead, I want to encourage the students to see that slowing down, talking to one another, and doing deliberate work produces better results without a loss in efficiency.

Finally, I spend a good bit of time thinking about my 100-level courses. I have embraced the flipped classroom, I’ve implemented, problem-based, group oriented work, and now I’m exploring the concept of community (perhaps even “communities of practice”) in the classroom. Without patting myself on the back too hard, much of what I do in this class is informed by various pedagogical conversations (in higher education). 

In contrast, my upper level courses tend to be pedagogically uninformed, at least by comparison. In fact, they continue to follow a traditional: lecture as scaffolding for discussion model. I have incorporated some “lab days” into the class, but again, these are fairly traditional and focus on reading sources, taking notes, producing outlines, and writing papers. A mentor of mine once quipped that historians do things backwards. They teach the most complex and demanding material at the lowest level. Diachronic 100-level survey courses regularly traipse over millennia (or at very least centuries) of content asking the students to pivot from one culture, landscape, political regime, and social situation to the next. This makes it difficult to maintain a unifying narrative (hence the traditional misconception that Rome supplanted Greece and the Middle Ages supplanted Rome that has become the bane of many a history teacher). Implementing a broad structural framework for these period, in contrast, runs the risk of being making the class ahistorical. Making the course “skills based” (say, reading primary sources or writing historical papers) threatens to transform a history class into some kind of introduction to the humanities (or worse: basic college skills) course. To somehow make a class like this work, we do what we’ve been trained to do: we apply ample layers of “pedagogy” to it and turn the class into a teaching challenge as a way to overlook the fundamentally flawed conceptual organization of the curriculum. Note, I am using the word “pedagogy” here like we used to use the word “theory” in graduate school; that is: this work is good, but would be better with more theory. 

Upper level courses, in contrast, are more discursively unified. The course aligns better with conversations and conventions in the discipline and, as a result, it is easier to organize the narrative, debates, and skills of these courses around disciplinary practices. There is less need for deliberate pedagogy as the disciplinary conversation alone provides ample structure. Of course, it is possible to add “the pedagogy” to the mix and to make disciplinary standards more accessible (especially in situations where many of the students are not majors), but in many cases, it’s not necessary. While I embrace this approach wholeheartedly, I can’t help feel like this mentality is old fashioned and the pride before the fall.

Scale (and Isthmia)

I was really excited to read Katie Kearns’s recent article in Heritage, “Everyday Climates: Household Archaeologies and the Politics of Scale.” It’s open-access; so you can read it too. Kearns argues for the significance of household scale research especially in the archaeology of climate change. This challenges the idea that global problems (or situations) require global approaches best conducted at the macro- if not planetary scale. She calls these approaches “big-scale” approaches.

For archaeology, the lure of big-scale approaches has fed the development of large-scale, collaborative archaeological work that often pulls together large quantities of climate data, site based information, and quantitative analysis. Big-scale archaeology relies on big-data to produce “big archaeology.” There is nothing wrong with this, but for many of us, archaeology remains better at producing small-scale knowledge through the intensive and often painstaking practice of excavation. Consequently there has emerged a bit of a mismatch between our hyper-focused practices and our desire for planetary conclusions. To be clear, Kearns does not argue this, but it feels tacit in her turn to household level archaeology to understand changes in storage patterns, consumption and discard, and gender based household economies. Going smaller teases out the human level impact of climate change and offers a counter-balance to the state, society, and transregional arguments often favored by archaeologists studying climate change.

For our work at Isthmia, Kearns’s recognition of small-scale archaeology was a welcome validation. While we’re not working on climate change, in particular, we are interested in certain phenomenon that like climate change, are often studied on the transregional and global level. We’re interested in the shadow of empire at the site of Isthmia where the massive, imperially funded Hexamilion Wall of the 5th century defines the spatial organization of the area. We’re also interested in using a “Dark Age” settlement of the 7th or 8th century as a way to think about demographic, economic, and social change often considered at the regional level. To do this, we’ve decided to dig down in the complexities of site formation in the late history of a 2nd century Roman bath and the traces of evidence left behind by households that lived in the bath’s ruins for what may have been only a few decades in a period of tremendous instability. Over 50 years of legacy data produced by the Isthmia Excavations supports this kind of analysis.

This is also true for our work at Polis.

I still think about slow archaeology and I suspect there is a connection between slow archaeology and small archaeology. These two approaches lean into the detailed, patient, and careful work that often requires limited focus and often produces correspondingly limited (or human, if you will) conclusions. 

The opposite is probably a kind of fast or big-archaeology. I can avoid feeling today that “big archaeology” (like big science) endures critiques (if not downright attacks) from both sides of the ideological spectrum. Reducing the plurality and complexity of the human experience to data even when it is in the name of progress risks complicity with the very forces that have created many of the contemporary crises from the start. There is a reason why our work is sometimes known as the industrial-military-university-archaeology complex. 

Of course, now, I’m getting away from Kearns’s argument and run the risk of deploying them in the service for things that may not align with her views! Check out the article, though.

Assembling the Fragments of Mobilizing the Archaeological Report for a Future of Reuse

A few weeks ago, I was hard at work on a draft of an article for the Journal of Field Archaeology’s 50th anniversary. You can follow some of the article’s development by tracing the links in this post. The article, “Mobilizing the Archaeological Report for a Future of Reuse: Linked Open Data in the Scholar-Driven Publication”, focuses on my work with David Pettegrew to produce Corinthian Countrysides: Linked Open Data and Analysis from the Eastern Korinthia which appeared earlier in the month from The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. Once I completed my roughest of drafts, I sent the paper along to my co-author, David Pettegrew, and he returned a much more polished and developed draft to me on the weekend.

Now all that’s left to do is tighten up our draft, finish citations, and add figures. This is always a bit more work than we want it to be, but I took a mighty swing at it yesterday and feel like the first two sections are pretty close to being done.

Here they are for your enjoyment:

Introduction

Among the most important results of the professionalization of archaeology in the twentieth century was the establishment of the archaeological report as the end game of archaeological practice and knowledge making. By both fulfilling the ethical expectations for fieldwork and satisfying archaeologists’ responsibilities to funding agencies, the report became the essential tool for communicating with professional communities and governing bodies. The regular output of reports revealed the processes whereby fieldwork generated discoveries and results. In academic environments, the published report also became something more—a means to advancement in processes of tenure and promotion and a measure of one’s standing the field. A well-presented, beautifully-illustrated and often costly monograph could establish the authoritative final interpretation of a building, site, or region for decades to come and guarantee the reputation and credentials of the archaeologist(s) who produced it. 

The digital transformations of the early 21st century have sharply challenged traditional ideas surrounding knowledge production and dissemination, including the process, form, and finality of archaeological reporting. Most obviously, the emergence of platforms for sharing research with professionals and public audiences have made it possible for anyone with an internet connection to access, share, and reuse data. The declining institutional market for traditional book-length publications in the publishing industry, meanwhile, has invited experimentation with alternate pathways for disseminating knowledge that make use of a growing range of digital technologies. Over the last half-century, the Journal of Field Archaeology has contributed to the critical reflection on the archaeological report itself as an expression of disciplinary practice (e.g. Opitz 2018; Hanscam and Witcher JFA 48 [2023] and JFA 11 [1981]). It is no wonder that scholars have begun to radically rethink the relationship between fieldwork, data, publication, and interpretation. 

Over the next half century, archaeologists will need to give greater attention to making the results of their fieldwork more intentionally findable, accessible, interoperable, and usable for future interpreters. In particular, practitioners will need to consider a future of archaeological publishing that achieves greater integration between archaeologist, publisher, and communities of scholars engaged in an ongoing production of knowledge through data production and reuse. Scholars will need to recognize and prioritize the collaborative processes of publication that invite participation and create more inclusive interpretive communities. In an ideal future, the discipline will recognize archaeologists less on the basis for issuing the final word on a site or building and more for their role in activating vibrant conversations among their peers. 

In this article, we underscore an underexplored pathway for reimagining archaeological reporting and data sharing in the next half century: linked open access book published by a scholar-led press. We use as a case study the publication of data and analysis of the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey, a diachronic, multi-disciplinary intensive distributional survey project conducted in the periphery of Ancient Corinth, Greece, from 1997-2003. The core of this work is a published multi-authored online dataset of 25,000+ records freely browsable and downloadable via Open Context, a platform for publishing archaeological research data. The authors of this article developed the book, Corinthian Countrysides: Linked Open Data and Analysis from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (2024), as a guide to understanding, accessing, analyzing, and reusing the open data. The online datasets and linked book make use of low-cost, persistent, and sustainable practices that both build upon existing digital infrastructure and software and evoke a traditional form of publication in a comprehensive archaeological report. Most importantly, this form of publication reflects and invites collaborative archaeological knowledge-making.

Our article unfolds in four sections. In the first, we introduce the concept of conviviality and shared knowledge making to inform recent discussions of multivocal and open-ended archaeological narratives, digital practices, and scholar-led publishing in archaeology. Next, we apply these concepts to a case study from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (EKAS), and the decision of the project to share its datasets through Open Context and a linked open digital book published by The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. In the third section, we describe the ways that David Pettegrew, author, and William Caraher, publisher, prepared the data and book for publication and set up scaffolding to encourage users to reuse data. A final section situates our experience publishing EKAS within the future landscape of archaeological publishing. We highlight how digital-first processes, methods, and approaches offer a compelling trajectory for future archaeological publishing in as much as they deepen reflexive practices and expand collaboration in archaeological knowledge making. In contrast to innovations in archaeological publishing that explore the bleeding edge of technology, our article presents a simpler alternative to reflexive archaeological publishing by outlining the practicality, challenge, and potential of DIY scholar-driven linked open publication.  

Open, Scholar-Led Publishing: A Convivial Approach to Reporting in Archaeology

As long as the JFA has existed, archaeologists have debated the nature of archaeological publishing and its intersections with disciplinary practice. Almost a half century ago, the journal featured a pair of influential essays by the journal’s editor and by a curator of a major museum outlining the ethical issues surrounding the publication of unprovenienced artifacts acquired on the art market (cf. Wiseman and Muscalla 1981). More recently, contributors have brought attention to the potential of publishing archaeology “at the digital turn” (Opitz 2018), the prospects and challenges of archaeological “Big Data” (Various authors, JFA 2020), and persistent gender inequality in publishing in our profession (Hanscam and Witcher JFA 48 [2023]). In short, contributors to the JFA have contributed to ongoing conversations about publishing in the discipline. 

In recent years, archaeologists of all stripes have critiqued the character of traditional reports as field methods, ethical concerns, disciplinary developments, and technologies have changed. Scholars, for example, have called attention to reports and “grey papers” as boring and even unreadable noting that reports’ imitation of the dry, analytic style of lab and field sciences, mark a problematic relationship between archaeological writing and epistemology (Hodder 1989, 200x; Wylie 20xx; Lucas 2018). The ongoing transformation of digital practices in the field have altered fundamental processes of fieldwork, data acquisition, and reporting as a shift to digital-born data has introduced more fundamental questions about the mode and finality of interpretation (Roosevelt 2015; See also the contributors to Averett, Counts, and Gordon 2016; Gartski 2020). As Gavin Lucas has noted, these discussions seemingly anticipate a return to epistemological concerns for the discipline as they emphasize the connection between narrative forms of publication (and exposition) and the changing character of archaeological practices and methods. Giorgio Buccaletti (2017) has shown, for example, how the fragmentary character of digital-born data, in particular, invites archaeologists to make visible the relationship between highly granular archaeological details and long-form written arguments. The fluidity and transparency of this relationship between digital data and published archaeological argument has made it increasingly possible for scholars to interrogate the finality of archaeological reports (e.g. Strupler 2021) and supports the kind of data reuse that encourages knowledge making as a more iterative and community-oriented process. 

The connection between archaeological narrative, digital practices, and epistemology has revealed exciting potential for archaeologists to make use of digital media and platforms to create more engaging modes of writing, to make transparent the foundation of archaeological arguments, and to invite participation in analysis and interpretation. Rachel Opitz’s 2018 article in this journal, “Publishing Archaeological Excavations at the Digital Turn,” for example, offers a good case in point by showing that digital practices in archaeology need not simply reinforce the granular character of digital information, but may open up authentic and diverse forms of narrative and storytelling. Opitz’s description of her digital publication of the Gabii excavations reinforces the potential of data-embedded scholarship to produce more open-ended kinds of publications that challenge the traditional notion of a “final report” and attract new audiences to reports and volumes. These arguments built upon perspectives that have simmered in the discipline for close to three decades on the potential of digital publishing to support more diverse and multivocal narratives (e.g. Tringham 2004; OTHER CITATIONS)  

Our contribution to these important developments in the field will focus on the process of publishing as the locus for knowledge making. In particular, we will emphasize do-it-yourself (DIY) and scholar-led practices as a form of conviviality. In this context, the concept of conviviality draws on the concept developed by Ivan Illich (1975) and encompasses shared practices in knowledge making common in both traditional societies as well as in the close knit and familiar relationships that often characterize archaeological field work (see Given 2017). Conviviality, as this paper will show, represents an open-ended form of collaboration that recognizes the shared agency and commitments to producing knowledge that extends from local knowledge and archaeological field methods to analysis, writing, and publishing. Leveraging convivial practice is even more relevant as the growing costs associated with producing and disseminating digital data encourages do-it-yourself (DIY) approaches that prioritize inexpensive ad hoc solutions through low-lost, off-the-shelf components and open source software. Open source software supported by dynamic and collaborative user and developer communities, for example, often provide workarounds to challenge associated with specialized–and often highly commercialized software and expertise. In much the same way, shared expertise between project directors, authors, digital data publishers, and scholars with book publishing skills has supported the development of collaborative, scholar-led publishing as a low cost and convivial alternative to traditional publishing. As we have argued elsewhere, scholar-led publishing practices in archaeology integrate publishing more deeply into the archaeological processes that start in the field (or even earlier) and continue through the appearance of linked data publication (Caraher 2022). The convivial approaches that emerge from these collaborations are often contingent, messy, and complex, but the willingness of archaeologists to involve themselves throughout the publishing process not only sidesteps many of the structures associated with traditional academic publishing but also embodies the shared commitment to knowledge making as a process that continues through and after publication. In many cases, the forms that convivial, scholar-led publishing produces are unique to the projects themselves and the character of the community responsible for the archaeological knowledge. Moreover, the distinct forms taken by scholar-led projects and the challenges that they face resist the priorities central to the commodified character of traditional archaeological publishing, such as scalability, and deliberately creates pathways for wider participation in analysis, publication, and knowledge-making (Schimmel 2022). 

By extending the convivial processes present in archaeological field work through scholar-led publication, we create an alternative approach to publishing archaeology with both economic advantages and a conspicuous commitment to shared knowledge making. This embeds in the publication process the collaboration central to archaeological epistemology and is consistent with the potential of digital practices to extend the convivial spirit beyond the publication of the book. It subordinates the authority of the author, vouchsafed by the independence of the traditional publishing practices, to the authority of the larger community of archaeologists and future readers who make use of the digital data.    

 

Jacques Ellul, AI, and Teaching

I made a classic mistake this week: I decided to start a 300 page book. It was impossible that I would finish it before the semester started to gain momentum and the waning days of my summer research and writing time would brusquely push aside any time (or honestly motivation) to read a book.

So, I can’t imagine finishing Nolen Gertz’s Nihilism and Technology (2nd Editing, 2024), and this is not because I’m not enjoying it and learning from it. I did, however, find time to read Gertz’s recent-ish piece in Commonweal on Jacques Ellul and AI. (Artificial Intelligence, not Allen Iverson, although that would be awesome). The piece is short enough and good enough that it’s worth just reading. I’ve used Ellul’s ideas in some of my writing in the past. 

The one thing that I took away from Gertz’s (and Ellul’s) argument is that using AI for writing assumes that the inefficiency in writing is a bug rather than a feature. This follows Ellul’s arguments that technology (and more broadly “techne”) has created and perpetuates the privileging of efficiency (and scalability) above and beyond all other goals. Ultimately, efficiency becomes a goal of its own and inefficient processes tend to attract technological solutions. Writing, which is inefficient for many reasons, was a natural fit for technology that aimed at producing greater efficiency. The recent growth of Large Language Model driven AI is hardly surprising. After all, who has the energy, time, and bandwidth, to write the dozens of cursory email that academics write every day?

That said, the reality is that most of my writing isn’t about producing a finished product (efficiently or otherwise). A quick read of this blog makes clear that my capacity to proofread, edit for style, and even articulate myself clearly remains a work in progress. I’ve started to write a few times a week in a notebook to create space for even more provisional writing, stuff that wouldn’t even necessarily have a place in a blog post.

Writing, then, for me is about thinking. It’s about process. And it’s about discipline. 

These are processes that resist efficiency in profound ways. There is no shortcut to the practice of writing 1000 words a day. You just have to do it. There is process to putting together thoughts in an orderly way on a consistent basis other than doing it over and over. And there is no short cut to the benefits that come from writing consistently which range from writing more easily (or at least enjoying writing more) to thinking more clearly (you’ll just have to trust me here!).

For my students, almost all of the writing that we do (99.9% of it) is provisional. None of the ideas that we articulate in class and in papers are meant to be the final word on any topic. What writing is meant to do is help students sharpen their thinking process. The same way reading helps students become better readers. Practicing an instrument helps a musician become a better player.

To circle back to Ellul, then, our job as historians (or as scholars in the humanities more broadly) is to make the argument that what we do and our students do isn’t an inefficient process grounded in antediluvian habits or values, but rather an integral part of the development of historical (and broadly humanistic) thinking. In other words, it’s a vital part of learning to think. 

It might be conspiratorial to observe that thinking is an inefficient process in and of itself. Most animals react more efficiently when they don’t need engage in thought and just react whether through instinct or training. (To be clear, I recognize that a trained or conditioned response does require some thought, but it’s not what we’d recognize as conscious thought.) That said, the inefficiency of thinking is what allow us to understand difficult questions, to address challenging problems, and to exercise discernment. AI for all its glibness with language has not proven particularly adept at framing or even answering difficult problems. And when it has produced valuable new insights, this is largely driven by human inputs. In other words, humans have done the work to formulate the questions, which reflects the capacity of human thinking to search for meaning and order in the world. 

Fortunately, most of my classes privileges the ability of writing to help us not only frame questions but to attempt to answer them. Since this is not the domain of AI — yet, and perhaps ever — it remains fairly easy to explain to my students why it is not a viable substitute for the challenging and inefficient work of writing in my class. 

Three Things Thursday: Zotero, Notebooks, and the Hand Written Book

This fall I have a few little goals that I hope will contribute to some good new habits. Two of these goals are the topic of today’s Three Thing Thursday:

Thing the First

I need to start using Zotero regularly. As readers of this blog know, I surf the web constantly and in my own flailing half-ass way, I try to keep abreast of what’s going on in my various fields. Zotero is citation and bibliography management software and it integrates with browsers, allows you to save PDF files to the cloud, and apparently can do wonderful things with word processing software (although I’ve never used this feature). 

Years ago, when Zotero was shinny and new, I used it constantly, but then about 2018, I fell out of the habit of using it and next thing I know, I’m building my bibliography for my book using Google Scholar and cut and paste. I’d love to say that I learned some kind of lesson, but honestly, I didn’t. I would do it by hand again without much objection. I listened to music, took breaks to read things that I wanted to read, and generally found it the kind of light duty work that was not unpleasant.

That said, my bibliographic habits are a bit out of control right now and since I’m “working” on three or four projects right now, I honestly need something to keep bibliographic sprawl (or downright chaos) in check. This is going to be the year that I lean into Zotero.

(It helps of course that many of my colleagues and collaborators are also using Zotero making it an easy way to share references!).

Thing the Second

Over the last month or so, I’ve started to get into habit of writing in my notebook every other day. It’s not yet an automatic routine, but I’m starting to feel some slight mental slight discomfort when I miss a scheduled handwriting day and the physical discomfort that I used to feel when handwriting for any length of time is slowly starting to abate. Right now, I’m using my notebook to sort of sketch out proto-blog posts (if you can imagine drafts rougher than what I write here), but also to try out new ideas and keep a more time-sensitive log of my reading and writing (sometimes this blog runs a week or more behind what I’m really thinking about, writing, or reading at any given time).

(I’m very much enjoying a LAMY Safari pen with a fine nib. I’ve never really been a fine nib person, preferring to write with medium thickness pens appropriate for my blurry and imprecise ideas, but this pen became an instant favorite.). 

I’d love to imagine that I could get into the habit of writing in my notebook every day, but that feels a bit too optimistic. It’s a “stretch goal”.

Thing the Third

If the first two things on my list are hopes for positive habits, the final thing is an overt fantasy. I started to wonder the other day whether it would be possible to publish a handwritten book. A couple of years ago, I imagined a short book on “slow archaeology.” This would undoubtedly be a vanity project (whatever interest people might have in the ideas) and it is tempting to double down on it by publishing the book in handwritten form.

Of course, there are some questions. First is would it even be possible for me to handwrite an entire manuscript? Right now, I can manage about 30 minutes of handwriting every other day before I start to get fatigued and my handwriting and thinking (such as it is) fall apart. I would have to get better at writing by hand.

Second, there is no chance that I could write out my manuscript only once. I would need to write it at least twice even if I cheat a bit and outline and compose some fragments on a word processor. 

Third, I know that handwritten work limits accessibility and I would imagine that I would have to provide a digital alt-text for the book (especially since my handwriting is impressionistic at best). Ideally I could produce this from the handwritten text rather than simply transcribing the typed text.

Would this kind of thing matter in any way? I don’t honestly think so. I would be quirky, it would be a challenge to do, and it would offer a practical (if patently absurd) perspective on slow practices in archaeology. 

Three Things Thursday: Writing, Wrapping up, and Looking Ahead

I am pretty confident that I’ve gotten “the good” out of my summer research leave this year and feel about as spent as I have in a long time. I have a few more days doing work here on Cyprus and will be heading home for a change of scenery at the beginning of next week. 

As I get older I’m discovering that summers are both too short, in that I never get everything that I want to do done during them, and too long in that I never have enough energy to push through my annual research leave in a productive way (and I continue to structure with the challenge of unstructured time). I think getting home, getting back into my reading and writing chair, and shifting my attention to more pressing deadlines will be restorative!

Here’s a little three thing peaking out from my exhaustion:

Thing the First

Here’s an excerpt from the final report I’ve prepared for our work at Polis! It’s a bit technical, but it’ll give you an idea of some of what I’ve done on research leave:

Introduction

In the summer 2024 season, we primarily focused on our work on the study of trench H10 in E.F2. While our goal was to offer preliminary observations on the architectural phasing, stratigraphy, and chronology of E.F2:P10 and E.F2:H10 excavated over the course of four campaigns in 1996, 1997, 2000, and 2003. This trench is significant owing to the presence of a number of features associated with industrial activities in the area. In this regard, the trench is representative of the larger workshop area south of the later basilica. Moreover, the trench produced a significant assemblage of terracotta figure fragments and lamps. This combined with its representative character encouraged us to document the trench thorough both to contextualize the terracotta figurines and lamps as well as to speak more broadly about the workshops in this area.

 


Big Picture Observations

Trench P10.1996, H10.1997, 2000, and 2003 reveals a complex series of phases and depositional events. The latest walls and burials are Medieval and Late Roman in date. There are also a series of Roman period and Hellenistic walls, a least one relatively well preserved Hellenistic pebble surface, and several features of Roman or Hellenistic date. While it is possible to date many of these features, it is very difficult to associate them with one another. The industrial function of the space seems almost certain. In fact, the difficult in associating features with one another likely speaks to the flexibility of the spaces which may have been rapidly adapted for new functions.

A key element in the adaptation of these buildings is the number of fills that appear to have occurred over its history. The location of the rooms on the west side of a natural ravine likely enticed later builders to fill earlier structures in order to use their eastern walls as ad hoc (or even deliberately reinforced) terrace walls. This allowed them to expand the amount of level ground at the site. The common appearance of rubble levels introduced an assemblage of ceramics that likely derived from domestic contexts and brought massive quantities of residual ceramics that both complicated functional and chronological analysis of the area. Fortunately, these residual ceramics presented a robust assemblage that will allow us to speak more broadly of activity in Roman and Hellenistic Arsinoe. While it is clear the domestic material is unlikely to have come from the immediate vicinity of the trench, it nevertheless almost certainly derived from Arsinoe.

Thing the Second

We’ve managed to spend about a full week studying and documenting an assemblage of material from some excavations in downtown Larnaka. The excavations were not stratigraphic, and as a result, we’re treating the assemblage as we would a survey assemblage. So far, we’re able to compare the material from the various parts of these excavations to those elsewhere in the region including Pyla-Koutsopetria, Panayia-Ematousa, and, of course, elsewhere at Kition (especially Kition-Bamboula). 

Here’s a little sample:

Tomi 5 produced a diverse assemblage of Hellenistic and Early Roman fine wares ranging from Hellenistic Color Coated Wares to Eastern and Cypriot Sigillata which all date to the last two centuries BC. As one would expect at Kition, the forms and fabrics present represent a range of imported and local fabrics. Notable in the assemblage is ESA 4B which is early in the ESA sequence and appears to reflect the predominantly earlier date of the assemblage from Tomi 5. It occurs at both Kition Bamboula, Panayia Ematousa, and at Pyla-Koutsopetria (as well as Paphos, House of Dionysios in 1st century BC contexts). ESA 63/64 appears at Kition Bamboula (no. 31) where it dates to the 2nd-3rd c. AD. A single example of CS appeared in this trench — CS36 — which is rare (an example from Paphos being the best example from the island), and dates early in the CS sequence. This form of CS is broadly consistent with the rest of the assemblage from this tomi which included inturned rim bowls dating broadly to the 2nd and 1st century BC. Cooking pots include variants known from Kition Bamboula, Panayia Ematousa, and Paphos including form CW13b1/PC4 which appears to date to 1st BC-1st AD contexts with some earlier and later variants of this form. This is also the earliest date for the casseroles referred to as CASS1 in Kition-Bamboula VIII and somewhat later in date (1st AD and later).

Thing the Third

This summer my colleague Richard Rothaus introduced me to the potential of AI to streamline certain aspects of our study seasons. For example, he trained CHAT GPT to read hand written inventory cards and organize the data on them to create a draft of a catalogue. To be honest, this blew my mind.

I also read Jeremy Huggett’s recent post on AI in archaeology with great interest and look forward to reading Martina Tenzer, Giada Pistilli, Alex Brandsen and Alex Shenfield’s recent article in Internet Archaeology. 

76 MMT 001_Page_10.

I wonder whether there might be a place for a piece titled “Slow Archaeology in the Age of AI.” The article would explore, on the one hand, the tension between the capacity for AI to produce unexpected results just as noising amplifiers, modified electronic keyboards, and the din from overdriven speakers create mediated sonic textures at punk rock show.  On the other hand, I could contemplate how AIs create another layer of black boxing that separates the archaeologist from the processes that produce knowledge. Even something as simple as transcribing notebook pages and inventory cards forces us to slow down and to think about process in a way that AI obscures. 

Three Things Thursday: Survey, Oil, and Mild Anarchism

Every now and then, life happens in threes and that makes me wonder whether I’m blogging about my life or I’m simply living out a series of blog posts. In some ways, I suppose, it doesn’t matter, but it sure makes three things Thursday a bit easier.

My next few days will be focused (such as I can at all these days) on these three things:

Thing the First

My old survey buddy David Pettegrew has put together an article that offers a preliminary analysis of the Medieval material from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey. This is a pretty exciting piece for two reasons. First, at some point in the distant past, it was originally intended to be a chapter of his soon to be completed book on the material from EKAS. When it dropped out of that volume, it wandered a bit in the wilderness before he found a home for it. 

Because these are hectic times for all of us, and writing about archaeology in the best of situations often takes a village, I offered to help get this article into final shape. One of the things that I’m working on is adding hyperlinks to the EKAS data in Open Context. This will allow the reader to drill down into the data from the article text, validate David’s arguments, and ask new questions from the raw material. This could mean looking at the data spatially in new ways, aggregating new assemblages based on material fro the same survey unit, or even connecting this data to other publicly available data sets. 

With David’s permission, I’ll share some of the linked assemblages new week.

Thing the Second

Last year, I wrote a short piece on the archaeology of petroleum production. My buddy Kostis Kourelis is pretty sure that the archaeology of oil will be next big thing. Oil is not only the quintessential modern hyper object, but also represents a type fossil for supermodernity. My article mostly just scratched the surface of the potential of an archaeology of oil as a key component of archaeology of the contemporary world as well as the kind of critical archaeology that offers new ways of understanding the modern age.

Part of the reason for this is because the article is destined for some kind of handbook of the archaeology of plastics. In fact, the editors and reviewers patiently pointed out, my article needed to connect oil and petroleum production to plastic more explicitly throughout. This was a fair point and I’ve been nibbling away at their helpful comments. 

In many ways, their urging that I connect petroleum production to plastics was more than just appropriate for the volume, but also useful for reconsidering oil and petroleum production as the definitive phenomenon of the supermodern world. The ubiquity of plastics in our everyday life is just one example of oil’s central place in our contemporary society. That said, plastic manufacturing and petroleum production rely on shared spatial footprints. The profoundly toxic sites of petroleum refineries attract similarly toxic petrochemical manufacturing plants that churn out the stock from which most new plastics are made. These plastic pellets then find their way into the world through some of the same infrastructure as our gasoline, heating oil, and other forms of petroleum that we use as fuel. In other words, plastic and oil share more than chemical DNA, but also leverage the same infrastructure that allows both to be always at hand in the contemporary world. Stay tuned for a plasticized draft.

Thing the Third

The third thing that I’m working on with a mid-February deadline is the revision of an article on a class that I taught as the centerpiece of the Wesley College Documentation Project. The article celebrated (I admit) the prospects of a “mildly anarchist” pedagogy that undermined the increasingly bureaucratized nature of both the modern university and archaeology as an industry. It attempted to embrace many aspects of slow, punk, and anarchist archaeology. Unfortunately, it also appears to have captured some of the more traditional elements of writing about archaeology as well. Namely the congratulatory nature of so many fieldwork publications that elevates the archaeologist from the deeply collaborative space of archaeological knowledge making to the august heights of heroic truth teller. 

This, of course, was the opposite of what my paper was intending to accomplish. I was hoping to celebrate the remarkable creativity that occurred over the course of a spontaneous, place-based, research program freed from much of the administrative oversight that can stifle the simply joy of wandering an abandoned place, thinking about the past, and working together to make sense of a building and its history.

That all said, the reviewers were probably doing me a favor by telling me to temper my congratulatory tone and do what I can to ground my excitement for the project in the dusty and incomplete world of reality. The last thing I want to do is to alienate a reader or conform to some kind of stereotype of ego-driven, tenured, middle aged, truth teller. Stay tuned for an updated and tempered draft. 

Digital Archaeology in Review

Over the weekend, I got a chance to read Colleen Morgan’s thoughtful review of digital archaeology published in the Annual Review of Archaeology this past month. The piece surveys recent trends in digital archaeology and, more important, urges the discipline forward toward a more reflective, ethical, and meaningful directions.

Unlike many approaches to digital practice in archaeology that trace the emergence and advantages associated with particular technologies, Morgan’s article steps back and focuses on how technology and practices produce new forms of knowledge (and new ethical problems and perspectives) for archaeologists to consider. To do this she focuses on four areas: (1) craft and embodiment, (2) materiality, (3) the uncanny, and (4) ethics, politics and accessibility, which she develops sequentially across the article.

The first two areas were pretty relevant to how I think. Her review of recent work that considered craft and embodiment, for example, makes clear how the changing skill sets associated with archaeological practice create new forms of archaeological knowledge. While my work, especially as associated with slow archaeology, has tended to view certain forms of technological change which shape our bodies in new ways and produced new forms of knowledge. On the one hand, this asks us to consider matters of commensurability between knowledge produced today and knowledge produced using older techniques and technologies. Morgan pushes this further to ask how contemporary digital approaches complicate our ability to empathize with people in the past and the present. The former are almost always the object of archaeological inquiry and the latter should be a concern of anyone working in archaeology especially as labor conditions in both academic and commercial archaeology have become a growing concern for the discipline.

I also very much appreciated her consideration of the materiality of digital practice. Not only does this force us as archaeologists to reflect upon the increasingly disposable character of the technologies that we use, but also the human costs of the networks of production and discard that make this technology possible. Here Morgan’s work intersects with both media archaeology and archaeology of the contemporary world. Her call for us to reflect on climate impact of digital archaeology is important. This not only involves the literal climate but also the social conditions necessary to produce the technologies (in their material and immaterial forms) that digital practices require.

The penultimate consideration of the article is perhaps the most provocative. Morgan considers the capacity of digital practices for creating uncanny encounters with the past. These uncanny encounters – manifest in their most simple forms as certain kinds of immersive digital environments and in more complicated ways as “deep fakes” – have the capacity to evoke emotional responses that range from the unsettling to the playful. How digital archaeology develops this heightened capacity for the uncanny will almost certainly exert a powerful influence over the future of the discipline.

Finally, Morgan explores the ethical and political landscape of digital practices. This is a complex matter, of course, that will invariably continue to exert a massively formative influence over discussions of digital archaeology for years to come. The gender make up of the field, our obligations to communities who don’t have access to the same technologies and skills, and the fate of digital data in both archives and online reflect the emergence of a new series of significant political commitments in the field. The capacity for digital archaeology to create “interventions” that allow indigenous communities to communicate their heritage and traditions expands on the potential for digital archaeology to produce politically meaningful knowledge. 

This article is short, but its utility and significance should be long. There is a tendency to see the landscape of digital archaeology to be a changing one and contributions to the field as ephemeral as the next technological leap. While the references in this article will not stand the test of time, I do suspect that Morgan’s framing of the debate will influence future discussions of digital practice for some time to come.