Excavating the Archive / Archiving the Excavation: Archival Processes and Contexts in Archaeology

Abstract

This article focuses on the production of archaeological knowledge within the fieldwork archive. Archaeological archives do not always reflect the reality of evidence uncovered during fieldwork processes or even the fieldwork processes themselves. This includes the many different agents and agencies, which are crucial to the construction of archaeological knowledge and their representation—or lack of representation—in the archive. Archaeological archives impose restrictions on how knowledge is included in a collection, the way it is recorded, and the fieldwork processes used. Therefore, this article considers the way in which the processes of archival documentation produce, transform, and construct archaeological knowledge. The main examples are from the British School of Archaeology in Egypt's excavations at Abydos between 1921 and 1922, often referred to as the Tombs of the Courtiers and directed by Flinders Petrie. Looking at the different contexts of an excavation archive, from before its creation to its ongoing curation and use, can reveal significant aspects not just of the history of archaeology but also on many of the ongoing recording methods and processes still used in the field today.

Tracking Local Employees of the British Mandate Department of Antiquities in Palestine

“…Their names, if indicated, were not always written correctly or entirely, making them difficult to identify. 31 They regularly remained unnamed in the title of photographs taken during excavations and unmentioned in archaeological reports. 32 These attitudes reflect the general archaeological working conditions but also the colonial and orientalist mindset of the time in the Middle East.…”

Reading Field Diaries against the Grain: The Notable and the Absent in Syrian Archaeology

“…In both of the examples I examine here -archives from the Syrian archaeological sites of Palmyra and Dura-Europos -that is the case, with the archives being secondary to the "real" material, the archaeological objects. Indeed, 'archaeological archives' is broadly a category which has been retrospectively invented, in part to deal with backlogged field data, although recent years have seen a shift in attention towards archaeological archives as a subject in their own right (Baird and McFadyen 2014;Riggs 2017;Hitchcock 2020;Ward 2022). Nonetheless, this status of archaeological records as secondary is one that should probably worry us, one among many crises to do with the storage of the vast amount of archaeological 'stuff' the discipline generates (Brusius, Singh, and Kersel 2017).…”