Cultivating trust, producing knowledge: The management of archaeological labour and the making of a discipline

Abstract

Like any science, archaeology relies on trust between actors involved in the production of knowledge. In the early history of archaeology, this epistemic trust was complicated by histories of Orientalism in the Middle East and colonialism more broadly. The racial and power dynamics underpinning 19th- and early 20th-century archaeology precluded the possibility of interpersonal moral trust between foreign archaeologists and locally hired labourers. In light of this, archaeologists created systems of reward, punishment, and surveillance to ensure the honest behaviour of site workers. They thus invented a set of structural conditions that produced sufficient epistemic trust for archaeological research to proceed—a system that continues to shape archaeology to the present day.

Knowing Palmyra: Mandatory production of archaeological knowledge

“…The phrase ‘Bakšiš for me’ in Ingholt’s diary is also a joke based on an inversion of the usual equation, with bakshish referring to the ‘tips’ or reward that were given to workers for artefacts, in addition to their salary. This colonial model was a normal practice throughout the Middle East at the time and continued at some projects after Syrian independence (Mickel and Byrd, 2021; Gillot, 2010). The stochastic nature of these payments was one way of controlling and ‘incentivising’ workers to turn over small finds, with the amount paid often bearing a relationship to what an object could be sold for on the black market (on Max Mallowan’s use of bakshish at Tell Brak in 1930s Syria, see Barmby and Dolton, 2006).…”