William L. Rathje, Michael Shanks and Christopher Witmore

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Extended summary of and excerpts from Rathje &al 2013 Archaeology In The Making

The book is divided into chapters, each of which contains conversations between one or more of the editors and one or two archaeologists. Below are short summaries and excerpts of each conversation.

Go to conversation with: - Lewis Binford - Michael Brian Schiffer - Patty Jo Watson - Colin Renfrew - Alison Wylie - Ian Hodder - Adrian Praetzellis and Mary Praetzellis - Kristian Kristiansen - George L. Cowgill - Alain Schnapp - Susan E. Alcock and John F. Cherry - Mark Leone - Victor Buchli and Randall H. McGuire - Margaret W. Conkey - Ruth Tringham - Lynn Meskell - William L. Rathje and Michael Shanks

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Lewis Binford

Lewis Binford
Summary
	Binford talks about processualism, the status of knowledge and facts in archaeology, and the kinds of questions that he believes can be asked. He also outlines his engagement with local communities and in what way archaeologists can involve themselves in those 'other' interests.
Excerpts
	facts and observation p.9	In archaeology, for instance, all factual knowledge of the archaeological record is created at the time persons make observations on the archaeological record. Factual knowledge, or knowledge claims regarding properties of the archaeological record are always contemporary with the observation-documentation event. Thus, most such "knowledge" is "subjectively" dependent upon the observer's selection of phenomena for description and recording. Thus facts are all subject to both subjective selection and association with other facts.
	against agency p.12	If we stay with agency we are just going to make up stories. These stories are not going to help us deal with these issues [classes of phenomena, behaviour]. Instead, let's stay with the scale at which we can begin to generalize about properties of the archaeological record. That's just a pragmatic suggestion.       I'm not saying that the individuals are not agents. They are, but agents of what? They are agents of unique individual patterns of long-term redundant patterns that don't change, so there has to be more to causation than just the agent that I cannot model!
	limits of knowledge p.14	That is what science is. That is why science bounds various domains. That is why science says this is the way we have to deal with this domain as opposed to that domain. Part of science is talking about, and learning about, where the boundaries conditioning different types of learning strategies might occur.
	local communities p.18	I cared. However, what most consumer groups want, let's take Native American people, is validation for some of their ideology concerning their clan origins, their sacred mountains, and so forth. The validity for that rests in their own belief systems and not in the archaeological record. I might be able to learn how long certain forms of belief have been part of their history, but if such knowledge challenged their own beliefs about their history, they would be upset, and I would be unable to ease their situation.

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Michael Brian Schiffer

Michael Brian Schiffer
Summary
	The discussion revolves around Schiffer's behavioral archaeology, how it has contributed to archaeology and the kinds of answers it can provide. Schiffer situates behavioral archaeology in relation to certain other approaches and his personal relation to them. He also talks about academic vs. contract / heritage archaeology and institutional structures.
Excerpts
	defining archaeology pp.25-26	The traditional definition of archaeology had been something the "the study of the past through archaeological remains." This definition was too confining and no longer accurate in the early 1970s because of the growing interest in ethnoarchaeology, historical archaeology, and modern material culture studies. Thus, J.Jefferson Reid formulated a new definition: archaeology is the study of relationships between human behavior and material culture in all times and all places (Reid et al. 1975).
	behavioral archaeology p.26	I have been defining Behavioral Archaeology as the study of relationships or interactions between people and artifacts - in all times, in all places, and at all scales (see LaMotta and Schiffer 2001).
	cognition p.31	Ignoring brain scans, cognitive structures per se are unobservable in the past or the present. Where Binford and I part company is that I believe it is legitimate to model past people's congitive structures for some archaeological problems. [...] ... I gradually accepted the need to deal rigorously with cognitive phenomena of the past. But we have to do it in a behavioral, not interpretive, way...
	cognition and science p.33	It is a mistake to believe that in modeling unobservables - e.g., cognitive phenomena - one has ceased doing science. Such a view embodies a hyper-empiricist conception of science that simply can't account for the production of scientific knowledge. The history of science teaches us that modeling unobservable phenomena is a legitimate strategy, regardless of subject matter. ... However, if one merely stops after having posited such cognitive structures, failing to follow out their empirical implications, then the scientific process has been truncated.
	academia vs CRM p.42	In the academy we have a limited crack at students. Let's give them the best intellectual preparation we ca. Let them learn the rest on the job in the CRM world. Training people specifically for CRM may, ironically, contribute to the split between academic and CRM archaeology.

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Patty Jo Watson

Patty Jo Watson
Summary
	Watson talks about gender in archaeology; what it was like being a woman in archaeology when she first started and to what extent things have changed. She explains her passion for cave archaeology and what makes excavation in caves so special. She also discusses her encounters with processualist and postprocessualist archaeology.
Excerpts
	gender p.50	The women tended to be assigned to the screen, to the lab, to places that weren't central to what was going on in the excavation. To places where there was not a lot of important decision-making going on.

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Colin Renfrew

Colin Renfrew
Summary
	The main agenda and concern of Renfrew's is here the looting of the past and the corresponding illegal trade that goes with it. Renfrew also discusses art, relativism and cognition, his work in the Aegean and Europe-wide syntheses and the big questions of archaeology.
Excerpts
	looting p.69	[W]hole categories of evidence are no longer accessible to us. This is true when you see temples being looted in Thailand and entire stone sculptures removed. I think the scale of destruction is much greater than ever before and that may mean some kinds of archaeology are no longer possible.
	material culture relations p.77	I think in human societies, certainly within the time range we are speaking of, many of the most interesting relationships were relationships which involved material culture in various ways. Material culture symbolized not by a dichotomy between though and thing, but symbolized in a more coherent way. I don't think we have yet been very good at grappling with those ideas which have yet to be more effectively introduced.
	cognitive archaeology p.82	I believe in scientific method, and I am very happy to be subjected to the scrutiny of scientists. I think the creation of knowledge is not so different in the different human walks of experience. Obviously when you are talking about human motivations they are more difficult to codify and indeed science in general is still not very successful at that. [...] As you know, my approach is that one should try and apply scientific method so far as one can. I am very happy to do that, and, as you know, my idea of cognitive archaeology is very much that. It is drawing on some of the desires and enthusiasms of interpretive archaeology also called postprocessual archaeology by some archaeologists, some of whom at a time set themselves up in opposition to the processual tradition. I query the appropriateness of that opposition, because I share the aspirations of the processual tradition, but I also share the aspirations of the interpretive or soi distant postprocessual archaeologists.
	relativism p.83	I completely agree and conceded that it is not always easy to establish the criteria by which this interpretation or your interpretation is better than my interpretation. But it is those criteria that I think are important. I see the path you are beckoning me down as a path heading towards relativism, which I would seek to avoid.
	big questions p.86	The "where do we go from here" would be interesting, but it may not be within the field of archaeology. The "where do we come from, what are we" is what archaeology can give us an answer to. It is the only approach which can give us an answer to aspects of those questions.

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Alison Wylie

Alison Wylie
Summary
	Working at an intersection between archaeology and philosophy of science, Wylie discusses the potential and problems of interdisciplinarity, the history of archaeology and repetition of theory (under new rhetorical banners) without knowledge of past thought. The topic of stewardship and looting is also a concern.
Excerpts
	archaeological amnesia p.95	To get a sense of what the published record presupposes requires serious archival research and oral histories, where they're feasible. Even so, I was struck by the degree to which earlier rounds of debate had just disappeared, even when they were readily accessible - a matter of prominent archaeologists publishing in mainstream journals on issues described in essentially the same terms as in current debates.
	evidence p.100	[T]he questions that interest me, and the kinds of tools required to address them, really push the envelope of conventional conceptual analysis. In most general terms, what animates pretty much all my work are some quite traditional philosophical questions about evidence: what counts as evidence, or to put it in more active terms, what makes for credible evidential reasoning in a discipline that aims at understanding a past subject and, specifically, a social, cultural, human past.
	defining archaeology pp.108-109	What is distincive about archaeology, what it has to offer the various disciplines now exploring "materiality," is a much more sophisticated take on what you can do with material culture. [...] I don't think any very precisely framed definition could capture all the things that archaeologists do or that archaeology is said to be; and any definition catholic enough to include everything practitioners count as archaeology will no doubt admit any number of other kinds of inquiry, expertise, forms of knowledge that you would not want to call archaeology.

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Ian Hodder

Ian Hodder
Summary
	Increasingly, Hodder's main focus seems to be on 'stakeholders' - the relation between archaeologists and various interest groups ranging from local to global in character. Hodder emphasises responsible archaeology that seriously engages with the questions and interests posed by these groups. Other topics include scale in archaeology (micro vs macro), materiality and entanglement, and the relation between academic and CRM/contract archaeology.
Excerpts
	archaeological goals p.123	I think there has been a shift in what the goal or the subject has been. The goal of archaeology used to be the study of the past through material remains, but I think it has shifted or, rather, ought to shift, to be the process of studying the relationships between people and their material pasts. It is always an intrusive relationship between people and their pasts.
	local p.128	The close links between archaeology and the local are important since it is local people that are usually most affected by archaeology. It is often the local people who stand to gain or lose most from archaeological intervention. But the local is not by its very nature a good thing. The local can be a good thing, but it can also have negative components. Local people may themselves exclude members from participation on unacceptable grounds (e.g. racist grounds). Also, categorizing people as local and most closely linked to the past may have negative effects, excluding people from global processes that they want to be involved in.
	micro vs macro big questions pp.129-130	That is, the small things in life (Deetz 1996) have had the accumulative effect of changing how we act in the world and thus had an impact on large-scale change. But I certainly wouldn't elevate this focus on the long march of the millennia as the only big question for archaeology. Archaeologists can also talk about the details of little moments in time. It is often the narratives we construct about those little moments in time that the wider world is most attracted to.
	materiality p.132	This simple archaeological observation suggests that far from sedimenting social structures, material engagement and entanglement lead to a proliferation of change. The reasons for this are probably complex, but in my view one important aspect is that things depend on us as much as we depend on them. Archaeologists have tended to focus on how humans use material culture to create society. But it is odd that they have not tended very much to the way that things need people - things needs continually to be replaced, repaired, maintained. ... So humans very quickly get entangled in a co-dependence on things.
	multivocality p.137	For me, multivocality and pluralism involve recognizing that there are a whole series of stakeholders with different types of power, with different sorts of demands which are all conflicting. As a member of a global community, you have to take some position in relation to that. You have to take a stand.

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Adrian Praetzellis and Praetzellis

Adrian Praetzellis and Mary Praetzellis
Summary
	Much of the discussion here is about the intersection between academic and CRM archaeology, where the Praetzellis have placed themselves and their institute. They explain how they use different kinds of publications or narratives for different audiences. Issues of relations with stakeholders become a part of this as well.
Excerpts
	authority and expertise p.148	[AP] I work on the assumption that there are things out there called facts, that they can be gathered, and that through skill and experience I can gather those facts better than other people. I can do so because I have learned from people who know how to do it and I have done it a lot.
	pluralism p.158	[AP] Why should our understanding of humankind have to be only through the eye of a scientist? There are artists out there too. Let's not allow the scientists to completely hijack archaeology. Science has useful bits to offer but it shouldn't determine your ultimate goal.

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Kristian Kristiansen

Kristian Kristiansen
Summary
	Kristiansen speaks about his involvement with both academia and heritage management and the status of theory in archaeology. He believes there is a general lack of historical perspective and context, and too much emphasis on the local. The bigger picture and broader syntheses should instead be attempted.
Excerpts
	politics p.170	The Heritage sector represents the most important link between research and politics that you can imagine. It is in Heritage that this link is played out. It is here that you really what learn the rules of the game are. It is here that you can materialize and try out your theory in practice.
	skills p.176	I am not talking about technical skills here. Of course, to learn to reflect on and take on board theory, to learn how to handle it and use it critically is a process of maturing both as an individual and as a researcher. We can never give that away.
	local vs global p.178	I feel even more strongly today than I did at the time I wrote that Europe Before History that processual and postprocessual archaeologists have missed a major historical dimension by being so focused on the local. ... In a way we have become more ignorant. We may know more about our local region, we may know more about a thematic body of literature, but people only read in their own language when they are from big countries. Many basically only read within their own national borders. [...]       We need to be more interdisciplinary. We need to come back to history. We need to have a perspective that is more historical.

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George L. Cowgill

George L. Cowgill
Summary
	At another intersection, this time between physics and archaeology, Cowgill explains how his earlier training informs his archaeological practice and the potential it offers. His interest is especially in statistics and recent methods such as Bayesian analysis.
Excerpts
	scale p.194	That is one reason why I stress chronology so much. I think the long time span is a series of short-term events that go on, that keep happening over a long period of time. It keeps changing and it is never static. The more you zoom in almost at the scale of moments, the better.
	subjectivity pp.196-197	I think it is unavoidable that people will bring their own presuppositions and it is unavoidable that there will always be unconscious assumptions. Like a Calvinist Christian, we can try and search our souls for our unconscious assumptions, but we'll never be wholly successful. But let's try to bring as many of them into consciousness as we can and then be humble about it. We have to realize that all our reconstructions of the past are always going to be conditional. We are never going to get the truth, but I really believe in the idea of coming closer and closer.
	Bayesian approach p.200	Classical statistics begins with this pretense that your mind is completely a blank slate as to what was likely to have been the true case and a totally false sense of objectivity. What the Bayesians do is grasp the idea that your prior beliefs matter to how you are going to interpret the data, so make your prior beliefs overt. They then build that into the question of how new data changes your old beliefs. They do not just forget about the old ones, but they create a coherent model of how new information is going to change how you thought before.

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Alain Schnapp

Alain Schnapp
Summary
	Schnapp shares his experience of French archaeology and the developments of which he has been part in the last decades. An important point coming out of this the discussion is how institutions shape the way archaeology is practiced.
Excerpts
	Anglo-Saxon dominance p.206	One can have two views concerning the present state of the sciences. The first view considers what is going on within archaeology. Here, the names of the pople typically selected represent a locally dominant Anglo-Saxon vision. But you have other continents.

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Susan E. Alcock

Susan E. Alcock and John F. Cherry
Summary
	Alcock and Cheery talk about their work with the new Joukowsky institute at Brown University and in Mediterranean archaeology. The topic of looting and preservation in archaeology is also on the agenda, as are the big questions of the discipline and the responsibilities of archaeologists.
Excerpts
	selective preservation p.235	[JC] I think there's going to be a push, of necessity, towards the preservation of carefully selected cultural landscapes rather than just individual sites. And we are going to move towards heritage parks, of the kind that have already been set up on a very modest at a few places within Greece itself.
	looting p.236	[JC] Some archaeologists - with reference more to North America than anywhere in the Mediterranean, although it applies equally to the latter - would claim that, given current trends, by the later stages of the present century most of the archaeological record as we know it may not exist any more. And in certain local areas that's pretty much the case already...
	big questions p.243	[JC] I do actually believe that there is a relatively small number of really big questions to which archaeology alone holds the key and can provide access - questions of universal significance because they relate to the history of all of us as human beings. I am thinking, for example, of the very origins of human culture, or the acquisition of language and the beginnings of symbolic behavior; the origins of agriculture and sedantism; the shift to organization in large population aggregates (whether or not we want to call that "urbanism"); above all, the evolution of complex societies. What archaeology as a field can contribute to knowledge is a nuanced sense of who we are, over the very long term.

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Mark Leone

Mark Leone
Summary
	Leone is a historical archaeologist, working on relatively modern sites. He argues against the concept of equal voices and recommends using one's emotions as motivation to engage in certain topics. The discussion is led by examples of things that moved Leone to act in archaeology (whether successfully or unsuccessfully).
Excerpts
	history of archaeology pp.251-252	In many ways, I don't think there have been changes in archaeology, if you mean major changes in theories used. I certainly can't track them coherently, in terms of major accomplishments that result from theories since the creation of the New Archaeology which did achieve major change. I think the way I would put it is that if we do have a history of archaeology, we create a false coherence. I'd rather try to say that archaeology has been led by the fact that it exists in the world, rathet that it has led where it goes.
	emotional reaction pp.253	So the element that I am introducing in this intellectual autobiography is that there were times when I was motivated, just as we all are as normal people, by feelings. That was when I took off and did something in archaeology to change it. The theory did not come first. My reaction to some experience did.
	equal voices pp.262	I actually feel fairly strongly regarding my fairly provocative statements concerning Native Americans, Aboriginal rights, and equal voices. First, there are certain voices that I would not give much room to other than in the context of the protection of First Amendment guarantees. I think Mormon archaeology is not something that I would give any room to other than what the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, say. There are other kinds of destructive archaeology, but Mormon archaeology is what I know from the inside, and I don't think that is an important equal voice.

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Victor Buchli & Randall H. McGuire

Victor Buchli and Randall H. McGuire
Summary
	The conversation revolves around modern material culture studies and its place within/in relation to archaeology. Particular emphasis is on Marxian influences of politics and class-consciousness, including overt use of material remains to make political statements.
Excerpts
	defining archaeology p.275	[RM] I was trained that archaeology was the study of material culture. Dealing with material culture was the definition of what archaeologists do. ... We did have a problem in that many archaeologists confronted us and asked us why we were working in such recent time periods. In other words, why were we working on a past that they saw as being very contemporary? Of course, when we started the [Ludlow] project we were in the same century as the events. So there was an unwillingness even on the part of people who worked in this area, which is referred to as historical archaeology, to accept what we were doing. For me, the archaeological nature of the project was non-problematic because of one of the things I got from being a student of Bill Rathje and Mike Schiffer is that archaeology is the study of material culture.
	politics p.276	[RM] To me what was innovative, indeed, what is innovative about the Ludlow Project, is a direct engagement with a political action - an explicit and overt political agenda. This kind of agenda is something that is very unusual in archaeology.
	class p.282	[RM] We are very much involved in a project of consciousness raising. The view that we take of class is for class to be classes for themselves. In other words, we are interested in groups having a consciousness that allows them to act in terms of their own interests. That kind of self-interest is something that is neither automatic, nor is it structural. It is something that is only acquired through considerable effort, struggle, and work. We are participating in that work.

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Margaret W. Conkey

Margaret W. Conkey
Summary
	Conkey's expertise is in the French Paleolithic, and she talks about her work on landscape in this area, and how this period of history is perceived in archaeology. Along the way, she touches on gender in archaeology and her personal career and experiences.
Excerpts
	feminist critique p.292	[W]hat we have seen in a lot of the works in the feminist critique of science is a focus upon the social lives of science and the ways in which the personalities, the personal experiences, and the contexts within which people do their work shape the research problems and questions. It follows that reflexivity is built in to the whole enterprise.
	evidence p.295	The whole discussion and debate about what constitutes evidence is really interesting to me. We all tend to think evidence is evidence, but it is not. We have seen this in how certain kinds of things in archaeology have been ignored; in the 1040s for example, we didn't have much concern with plant remains. Slowly but surely, we see the recognition that plant remains are evidence and they are possible to find and use and so forth. By now we are regularly thinking about starch grains and phytoliths! I think there is a very interesting history to be written here.

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Ruth Tringham

Ruth Tringham
Summary
	Tringham talks about her work in eastern Europe and her interest in new technologies for teaching archaeology, especially modes of simulation and use of the web.
Excerpts
	knowledge p.312	This is why it was such a relief, a revelation, and a revolution for me to be introduced to the legitimacy of the use of interpretation in the construction of knowledge. For me this came in the guise of the feminist critique of science rather than the writings of postprocessual archaeology...
	synthesis and emperialism p.321	None of the people in the areas I was writing about had written such a synthesis because the rule was that you stuck to your own borders. You synthesized what was going on in your own country. You didn't do the very imperialistic act of bringing all the material together from the different countries, other people's countries. That was what the British did.

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Lynn Meskell
Summary
	The engagement with materiality, embodied experience and heritage comes to the fore. Meskell especially speaks of her experiences in South Africa and the importance of the impact of archaeology on living communities.
Excerpts
	heritage p.336	There are also these larger development projects that are increasingly looking to archaeological heritage as a way to intervene and "develop" certain communities. There is often sociopolitical uplift attached, but with development comes all the caveats and critiques of a new form of colonialism basically, and neo-colonialism. So I think that also connects to current global crises and responsibilities - humanitarian crises, wars, international intervention, etc. - and so hertiage has become part of a political arsenal as well. I think this forces us as practitioners to engage and here we must adopt a different public footing. We have a newly forged role as public intellectuals to address these issues.
	stakeholders p.342	... one person's destruction is another's preservation. Everything is so context based and you cannot always say that this indigenous group is going to trump another one. You cannot always say that the immediate stakeholders that live there now are always the primary ones. It's obviously much more complex. You have got diasporic communities; you have all these other communities of connection and these situations cannot be codified for in any simple way. It has to be an ongoing negotiation that puts people together in discussion.

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William L. Rathje & Michael Shanks

William L. Rathje and Michael Shanks
Summary
	Rathje and Shanks discuss some of the topics that have repeatedly occurred in the conversations. In particular, they wonder about the apparent unwillingness to include study of the contemporary and recent past into the rubric of archaeology.
Excerpts
	trash p.354	[WR] Examples abound, but a good place to start is by considering the perspective of archaeologists, whose life's work is the study - in excruciating detail - of the garbage past societies have left behind. Such connoisseurs of ancient refuse must have a truly exquisite appreciation for their own society's discards - or do they?
	creating the past p.357	[MS] Over the last 40 years there has grown the realization, the consciousness that archaeology is of profound significance to people today. Archaeology is not just about the past. It's about what remains of the past. Concomitantly the old model of stewardship (see Wylie, Ch. 6), that archaeologists find and look after what's left of the past, that archaeology is a field of conservation, is complemented by an acceptance that archaeology is as much labor and production, where archaeologists are making something of what is left of the past - working on what remains of the past.

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