Acts of Discovery: An Ethnography of Archaeological Practice

By Matt Edgeworth

Social Software Version

Turning the outward-looking gaze back on the treasure-house of material items of equipment stored in the tool-shed and the planning-hut is a strategy that is likely to cause surprise. Such implements are rarely if ever constituted as the objects of attention in themselves; they are used to work upon other objects, and it is those objects being worked that occupy attention. Tools such as trowels, spades, brushes, cameras, scales, theodolites and planning-frames are the mundane things of everyday life for archaeologists working out in the field. Yet these are the implements through which the objects of knowledge are brought to light, manipulated, meaningfully-constituted and transformed into textual data. It is precisely these mundane articles that mediate the subject-object and culture-nature transactions that characterise the production of archaeological knowledge. Any general (i.e. reflexive) theory of material culture should start here… read more

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This report is based upon an ethnography of the excavation of a Bronze Age ring-ditch cemetery in the east of England ... pictures