Perhaps an “archaeological personality” of sorts is emerging outside our modest scholarly circles; that is, the things historical archaeologists value are fascinating (if not important) to many people:  the allure of material culture, the compelling stories of everyday people, and the importance of community heritage all seem to find receptive constituencies.  Yet at the same moment the profession in its present form is radically transforming.  CRM firms are forced to manage modest budgets while they treat employees fairly; museums and preservation organizations have been gutted; politicians routinely criticize anthropology and archaeology; and even insulated university faculty are soberly advising students about the future of archaeological employment both within and outside the walls of the academy.  Just as we seem to be turning everybody into an archaeologist, the profession of scholars doing archaeology for a wage seems under risk.

We may need point no further than the television set to confirm that an archaeological engagement with things and everyday heritage has captured public imagination.  That broadly defined archaeological personality is reflected in forms that are sometimes clumsy, shallow, or unethical.  For instance, Antiques Roadshow, Storage Wars, and American Pickers are among a host of shows that revolve around pillaging things from attics and storage sheds; a wave of genealogy series illuminate our mass quest for heritage harbored in the lives of anonymous ancestors; cable is littered with alien fantasies and concocted historical mysteries revisiting the builders of the pyramids or Stonehenge; and a wave of metal detecting shows has staked a populist claim on archaeological resources.

There still is thoughtful conventional archaeological fare like Time Team, but many of the popular discourses on things are not especially archaeological in a traditional sense.  Instead, they have taken aim on a breadth of prosaic materiality and everyday histories, in some cases with an alarming aversion to scholarship and critical thinking.  Television planners recognize that things have a sensuous grasp on our imaginations, and the medium delivers visual appeal, emotional impact, and satisfying (if hackneyed) narratives, all in the service of raw profit.  TV may not represent archaeological scholarship at all; instead, it paints a picture of archaeology as programmers wish it would be, turning us into characters and the discipline into a broad fascination with things and the everyday.

Television certainly does archaeological scholarship an injustice by reducing research rigor to a shallow story.  Nevertheless, it may be capturing our personalities quite presciently.  Many of us were brought to historical archaeology by our fascination with historical tales submerged in conventional scholarship; we enjoy the field, lab, and archival experiences of discovery; we share an engagement with material things; and we are tremendously satisfied to share peoples’ historical stories with them.

It may be that this curiosity, reflectiveness, creativity, and democratic instinct are what we might circumspectly call an “archaeological personality,” and it reaches well beyond our restricted scholarly circles.  Every television viewer has material things that inspire deep and even inexpressible feelings; we all have a family tree, and most of us are curious about the characters and tales peopling our bloodlines; and many people are strongly connected to local places that seem unlikely to ever figure in grand historical narratives despite the meaningfulness of their residents’ lives.

It is perhaps intellectually interesting that the narrow focus on excavated things from the past has given way to an archaeology that takes aim on nearly any thing across time and space.  Yet on television this has forged a populist picture of material heritage that everyone can feel, participate in, and—if armed with scuba equipment, a metal detector, or an attic ladder—recover for themselves.  We may be part of a moment in which what we do and are interested in is appreciated, and the steady traffic in archaeology students seems to confirm persistent commitment to historical archaeology.  Yet the rigor of archaeological research and the depth of training for a historical archaeologist seems to be somewhat undervalued and perhaps taken for granted.

Many of the questions about archaeological employment have always provoked some anxiety; scholars, teachers, students, and a host of family members have often been apprehensive about archaeological careers.  At this moment, the profession—regardless of whether our salaries come from firms, universities, federal agencies, or any other entity—faces a challenge to rationalize historical archaeology and not simply stake our careers on the presence of historical preservation legislation or the allure of tenure.  Practically, some political voices aspire to gut the legislation that revolutionized American historical archaeology; and the number of tenure-stream historical archaeology positions is very modest and certainly not expanding.

Nevertheless, many of us have concrete experiences with lots of people who are committed to archaeology, preservation, and heritage.  Many archaeologists at the outset of their careers crowd university hallways and are doing or seeking employment with firms, agencies, and universities.  Further, we have all the evidence of archaeology’s power that is provided by imperfect television series.

Lazy politicians and pop commentators commonly use archaeology as an easy critique of the dilemmas of scholarship, budgets, or ideology, and the politicians in particular need to hear from constituents whose stake in historical archaeology cannot be dismissed as spoiled scholars defending intellectual turf and exorbitant salaries.  The historical archaeological community worldwide is a rather modest number of professionals, but the communities we impact are enormous.  In the US if not the rest of the world, the voices of these non-professionals who are fascinated with our work needs to be mobilized more effectively.   The public archaeology events at the SHA conferences are always well-attended, and many of us have wonderful field projects that integrate avocational archaeologists and public constituents in creative and consequential ways.

For the neighborhoods that are changed by your scholarship, ask them to write their Congressional representatives, community politicians, local universities, and the granting agencies that support archaeology so they can tell their stories.  So many people seem to be fascinated by our scholarship, but we risk leaving it to be distorted by TV producers or grossly misrepresented by politicians using archaeology as their ideological straw person.  The discipline will inevitably change and become ever-more ambitious and interdisciplinary, which is intellectually exciting, but as it changes we need to keep reminding people what historical archaeologists actually do that builds communities in modest but important ways.

Historical archaeologists routinely excavate massive assemblages, and we nearly always consign them to storage awaiting the analysis of future scholars.  As a result, storage spaces are overflowing in many repositories, and dwindling budgets have restricted spaces and in some cases eliminated collections managers if not whole projects.  Many repositories have no especially reliable record of the materials in their possession, others cannot clearly document their ownership of holdings, and some are not remotely close to legal curation standards.  Archaeologists are well-trained in excavation and material analysis, but curation and placing things in collections—much less maintaining them afterward and managing their long-term storage or even de-accession—have not occupied much of our disciplinary attention.

On the list of fascinating archaeological research subjects, curation may not normally jump to many peoples’ minds.  Collections scholars have rigorous curation, acquisition, and de-accession practices and standards, but most archaeologists have not received particularly systematic collections management training and may not comprehend the broad challenges facing archaeological collection managers.  More than 30 years ago William Marquadt, Anta Modet-White, and Sandra C. Sholtz proclaimed that there was a crisis in the curation of American archaeological collections, but the oft-ignored question of archaeological curation remains awkwardly evaded today.

More than a half-century of enormously productive historical archaeology fieldwork has left us with a voluminous material heritage to manage.  Some long-term repositories are literally full, are unable to accommodate more collections, have decided to no longer curate archaeological assemblages, or have had their curatorial staff laid off.  Increasingly more repositories charge archaeologists to store materials, but we rarely if ever include particularly concrete financial curation budgets in our project designs.

The challenges extend throughout the world.  For instance, in 2008 the Europae Archaeologiae Consilium hosted a symposium on archaeological archiving that examined dilemmas familiar to many North American historical archaeologists, including the challenges of a vast range of archaeological recording practices and curatorial standards, the need to establish digital archive standards, and management conditions that fail to satisfy the Valleta Treaty (also known as the European Convention on the Protection of the Archaeological Heritage).  In Britain, the Institute for Archaeologists Council has a Special Interest Group for Archaeological Archives that aspires to develop curatorial best practices and advocate on archaeological archives issues.

On one level, curation dilemmas raise practical financial and methodological challenges.  Narrowly defined, we minimally face a practical resource dilemma in the expense of storage, but this has methodological implications on what we actually collect in the field, de-accessioning risks taking aim disproportionately on historic artifacts, and curation policies certainly will shape the collections we leave available to subsequent scholars.

On another level, de-accession poses a particularly complex philosophical challenge to our stewardship of the archaeological past.  We have implicitly linked our stewardship to saving everything, but this avoids acknowledging the state in which many collections are held, and it ignores the financial and material realities of managing such resources.  Museums have long de-accessioned holdings as a normal part of collections management; that is, museums reassess their collections and permanently remove objects that are redundant, duplicates, deteriorated, or outside their mission.  Library archivists likewise manage their collections by regularly reappraising collections and implementing formal de-accession policies based on factors such as infrequent use.  In contrast, archaeologists have normally assumed that artifact collections are simply placed in permanent storage.  Responsible scholarship demands trained curatorial professionals working in costly facilities, but most of us do not have curatorial training and are faced with less-than-ideal repository conditions.  There is no absolutely objective process to decide what might one day be important to scholars, so de-accession is especially threatening to those of us who feel responsible for passing on organized and rich collections to future researchers.  However, we need to recognize that de-accession is one element in broad management strategies well-developed by museums and archives faced with many of the same challenges archaeologists face.

One final dimension of this curation crisis that remains awkwardly avoided is the lack of research that is being conducted in archaeological repositories.  Esther White and Eleanor Breen’s thoughtful 2012 assessment analysis of Virginia’s archaeological repositories revealed that more than two-thirds of Virginia’s archaeological repositories are never used for research.  If we are going to preserve so many collections then scholars need to use those collections and not simply view them as dead storage.  The lack of more collections research may reflect an archaeological culture that grants professional prestige to scholars who conduct their own field projects.  American academics administering student research, for instance, often encourage graduate students to conduct their own digs, which provides some control over their data and demonstrates their mastery of a breadth of archaeological skills.   Part of the reluctance to do collections research probably also reflects our disciplinary celebration of the field experience itself and a tendency to paint “dirt archaeology” as the heart of archaeological identity.

Nevertheless, perhaps the most ambitious comparative research projects can only be conducted in museum collections.  Beyond the scholarly rigor such work can provide, leaving so many collections to languish means many assemblages will only be reported in technical reports.  Collections research has not always been especially well-funded by granting agencies, but the cost of collections projects is often much more modest than a single field season excavation.  I personally traveled to do collections research in the UK in London and York based on a relatively modest grant from my University, and that provided me the chance to work with an especially rich sample of materials  I could never have hoped to find in any single excavation anywhere.

The SHA’s goal has not been to impose codes of conduct on archaeologists and managers; rather, we simply hope to encourage responsible and informed practice and frank acknowledgement of curation challenges as part of all field archaeological research.  We need to think responsibly about the final curation of the materials we excavate, and a realistic management plan should be in every research proposal.  The SHA has strongly discouraged collections de-accessioning, but we may need to develop more concrete processes to confront the challenges many repositories face, and obviously many archaeologists and collections managers are wrestling with comparable issues.  All of our research proposals have some statement on the collection methods and long-term storage of artifacts, but some are a bit ambiguous, and even the best-planned curation plan can be derailed by new policies.  We share a common belief that every artifact has some research potential, but we need to soberly weigh the economic and practical realities of storing every object we recover into perpetuity, and we need to acknowledge that a new generation of archaeologists will eventually inherit scores of assemblages gathering dust.  We face many common challenges, and we stand the best chance of developing responsible strategies if field archaeologists and collections managers share our experiences, challenges, and real and proposed solutions.

All images appear courtesy Terry Brock’s flickr page

Links

Compare the materials on the January 2011 SHA Forum on Collections Management, which included a preliminary working statement on collections management.

There are numerous state and federal guidelines for Archaeological Curation Standards, which of course include the SHA Standards and Guidelines for the Curation of Archaeological Collections.  The Society for American Archaeology includes links to a wide range of Archaeological Ethics Codes, Charters, and Principles.

The National Park Service inventories some standards and research on archaeological curation on their Sources of Archaeological Curation Information page.

British scholarship on these issues can be found at the Institute for Archaeologists Archaeological Archives Group and their Archaeological Archives Special Interest Group facebook page.  They hold Regional Archives Workshops to promote best practices in archaeological archives management.

European standards for archaeological archives can be found at ARCHES (Archaeological Resources in Cultural Heritage: a European Standard) and on the ARCHES web page.

References

Bustard, Wendy

2000 Archaeological Curation in the 21st Century, or, making Sure the Roof Doesn’t Blow Off.  CRM 5:10-15.

Childs, S. Terry

1999 Contemplating the Future: Deaccessioning Federal Archaeological Collections.  Museum Anthropology 23(2):38-45.

Childs, S. Terry and Karolyn Kinsey

2003 Costs of Curating Archaeological Collections: A Study of Repository Fees in 2002 and 1997/98.  Studies in Archeology and Ethnography, National Park Service.

Doylen, Michael

2001 Experiments in Deaccessioning: Archives and On-Line Auctions.  The American Archivist 64(2):350-362.  (subscription access)

Greene, Mark A.

2006 I’ve Deaccessioned and Lived to Tell about It: Confessions of an Unrepentant Reappraiser Archival Issues 30(1):7-22.

Patrick D. Lyons, E. Charles Adams, Jeffrey H. Altschul, C. Michael Barton, and Chris M. Roll

2006 The Archaeological Curation Crisis in Arizona: Analysis and Possible Solutions.  Unpublished report prepared by the Curation Subcommittee of the Governor’s Archaeology Advisory Commission.

Marquardt, William H., Anta Montet-White and Sandra C. Scholtz

1982 Resolving the Crisis in Archaeological Collections Curation.  American Antiquity 47(2):409-418.  (subscription access)

Sonderman, Robert C.

1996 Primal Fear: Deaccessioning Collections.  Common Ground 1(2) Special issue Collections and Curation.

Sullivan, Lynne P., and S. Terry Child

2003 Curating Archaeological Collections: From the Field to the Repository.  Altamira Press, Walnut Creek, California.

Trimble, Michael K. and Eugene A. Marino

2003 Archaeological Curation: An Ethical Imperative for the Twenty-First Century.  In Ethical Issues in Archaeology, edited by Larry J. Zimmerman, Karen D. Vitelli, and Julie Hollowell-Zimmer, pp.99-114.  Altamira Press, Walnut Creek, California.

Weil, Stephen E., ed.

1997 A Deaccession Reader.  University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

White, Esther C. and Eleanor Breen

2012 A Survey of Archaeological Repositories in Virginia.  Council of Virginia Archaeologists Curation Committee.

Oddly enough, C-SPAN’s pace is a lot like archaeology.  In contrast, most 21^st century consumers are accustomed to receiving news as reductive “talking points,” acrimonious quotations, or short messages scrawling along the bottom of the screen during a football game.  This presentation of the news is nearly indistinguishable from all our other televised entertainment, which washes over us with instantaneity and is focused on the spectacular moments.

This makes archaeology a somewhat challenging fit with media discourses.  Archaeology is of course a laborious experience that involves long days of mundane chatter across excavation units, hours washing and identifying artifacts, and the long process of weaving it all into a persuasive and rigorous analysis.  Yet archaeology is still a staple of popular culture:  We often dig in aesthetically striking places; the prosaic things we recover establish emotionally compelling relationships with the past; and lots of archaeologists are articulate and thoughtful narrators.

Archaeology and material culture programming is inevitably all over the spectrum of contemporary cable channels, but the realities of archaeological investigation and scholarship risk being ignored for splashy aesthetics, contrived archaeological questions, and practices that are questionable scholarship if not ethical violations.  Programmers have now populated cable television with a host of television series that weave sensational narratives, stress engaging aesthetics, and feature “big” personalities.   Much of the attention the SHA is giving to such programming today has been triggered by television shows that violate archaeological ethics, misrepresent archaeological and preservation laws, glamorize looting and “treasure-hunting,” and reduce artifacts to commodities.  Popular culture is a distorted reflection of society, letting us glimpse ourselves in compelling, spectacular, and sometimes deluded dimensions that strip away all the prosaic realities of everyday life:  can archaeology flourish in media structured around such principles?

As President-Elect Charlie Ewen has reported, one of the television shows misrepresenting archaeology was National Geographic TV’s show Diggers, which features a pair of American metal detectorists.  Their initial programs resulted in a groundswell of alarm from archaeologists and allies, and National Geographic met with SHA and Society for American Archaeology representatives in May, 2012 to discuss ways changes to the show.

We are now seeing these new shows, and they force us to ask two basic questions.  First, the narrow question is how do historical archaeologists feel about these revised Diggers shows?  Do they reduce archaeological scholarship and preservation commitments to superficial entertainment?  Do they encourage viewers to appreciate our archaeological heritage or even search out local archaeologists?  Or do they instead issue an invitation to set off in search of backyard treasure?  Second, the broader issue is what in our collective imagination would constitute a “good” historical archaeology program?  If we were given control of a television series about historical archaeology, what would it look like and could we make the programming compelling to a broad range of viewers?

The producers of Diggers agreed to make some changes following that May meeting, and I want to identify what seem to be two key shifts and ask all of you to assess those changes.

1. First, perhaps the most significant change was the introduction of an archaeologist to the show and the network’s agreement to contact local archaeologists (several have worked with the National Geographic TV’s film crew since May).  The programmers agreed Diggers should focus on research questions framed by an archaeologist that metal detecting can illuminate.  It was agreed that episodes focusing on archaeological or historical sites should feature archaeologists consulting with the show’s detectorists.
2. Second, the network agreed that ethical guidelines for responsible metal detecting would be referred to during the program and on the show’s web page.  The archaeologists indicated that the show could not include any commercial sale of artifacts.

The revamped web page supporting the show addresses some of the complexities of archaeological recovery and context and the ethics of metal detecting, but the show itself remains the vehicle of the two detectorists, “King George” Wyant and Tim “The Ringmaster” Saylor.   The archaeologists who are now involved with the show are not always particularly visible, and complex heritage narratives are inevitably transformed in the hands of the show’s two avocational detectorists.  Wyant and Saylor’s amplified personalities, naïve curiosity, and overblown joy finding artifacts have disappointed some avocational detectorists who argue that the stars’ seemingly contrived personalities are not appropriate reflections of the hobby’s professionalism.  For some detectorists, misrepresentations of the hobby are stigmatizing and actually damage the potential for research partnerships.

In February, I and SAA President Fred Limp wrote to National Geographic and advocated providing archaeologists more visibility within the show, arguing that coordination between avocational detectorists and archaeologists provides an important model for both professionalism and collegiality.  For instance, Kim McBride, a historic archaeologist with the Kentucky Archaeological Survey, was part of an episode on the Hatfields and McCoys; Don Southworth of Sagebrush Consultants worked on an episode filmed in Idaho; and Harvard Ayers appeared on an episode on the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain.  Yet the show has in some cases had trouble finding archaeologists who will work with the producers.  Wyant and Saylor are perhaps choreographed characters that reflect what TV producers believe is entertaining, but the only way to change such stereotypes is to have compelling scholars’ voices in such programs and advocating for sound practice.

We have long argued that commercial exploitation of artifacts is unacceptable.  Antiquarians have sometimes sold artifacts for charitable causes, and as museums de-accession some holdings it is likely that some archaeological artifacts will be sold.  But historical archaeologists have generally tried to avoid that slippery footing and resisted all commercial artifact sales, a code that is being tested by the newest wave of television shows.  On Diggers, for instance, the show still indicates how much artifacts are hypothetically worth:  this does not involve the sale of artifacts, but it does venture into problematic territory that concedes artifacts have an exchange value.  The show’s producers argued in May that audiences find these values compelling, but we may conclude that the concession of exchange values risks issuing an implicit invitation to plunder historic sites in search of ebay loot.

From a television programmer’s perspective, exchange value may provide a readily apprehensible meaning most people recognize:  the audience mulls over the value of an object during an Antiques Roadshow assessment, for instance, and the appraised value delivers a compelling punctuation for the object’s narrative.  However, the imposition of such exchange values on archaeological artifacts and the persistent fascination with “treasure” may fatally compromise our ethics by allowing exchange value to shape how people see material things and heritage.

While National Geographic TV is willing to work with SHA, Spike TV continues to produce its Savage Family Diggers (formerly American Diggers).  Savage Family Diggers, the vehicle of former wrestler Ric Savage, educates its audience on how to find privies and wells (though their web page cites the Society for American Archaeology’s metal detecting laws webpage), and they have shown no interest in partnering with archaeologists.  Spike TV’s Sharon Levy, the executive vice president for development for the channel, said last March that Savage’s show is part of “a crowded genre … called `object-based television.’”  This places treasure hunting shows amongst the rich range of series examining storage bin auctions, antiques, and pawn shops, and an even broader range of shows on heritage and history.

For some archaeologists, science simply may not be reducible to satisfying media representations, but professional archaeologists are never going to control how the discipline is represented in popular discourse any more than we can dictate how communities choose to address their heritage.  Is it a Faustian bargain to partner with the media?  Are we doomed to simply be props while our real insights fall to the editing room floor?  Can archaeology secure a role in contemporary popular culture in which archaeological scholars influence minds and politics?  What do we really have to gain from doing these television shows?

The answers to those questions are not entirely clear, but the death rites for the traditional archaeological documentary and the unassailable academic have been written.  The question is not if popular culture is going to seize on archaeological narratives and material culture; the issue is how archaeologists are going to become a presence that pushes media planners to do thoughtful and responsible archaeological programming.

The Questions in “Diversity”

This year I have reported several times on the SHA’s effort to make diversity an increasingly articulate part of the SHA mission and our collective scholarly practice (compare columns on Global Historical Archaeology, Historical Archaeology in Central Europe, and Diversity and Anti-Racism in SHA).  There are a cluster of practical questions raised by “diversity”:

• - What does it even mean to be “diverse”?  Many of us have become somewhat wary of the term “diversity,” so this demands some concrete definition;
• - Why might we or any other discipline or professional society desire diversity?;
• - What access barriers face various archaeologists and SHA members across lines of difference?;
• - What are the international implications of diversity when we step outside the familiar lines of difference in America?

Many of these questions are to some extent rhetorical in the sense that they have no satisfying answer with utter resolution, but the honest, reflective, and ongoing discussion of all of them is critical.  The most recent discussion on these issues came in a Gender and Minority Affairs Committee Panel at the 2013 conference in a session that included Carol McDavid (Community Archaeology Research Institute) and Maria Franklin (Texas) as Chairs, with panelists Whitney Battle-Baptiste (UMass), Chris Fennell (Illinois), Lewis Jones (Indiana), and Michael Nassaney (Western Michigan).  They were joined by Richard Benjamin (International Slavery Museum, Liverpool) and Bob Paynter (UMass).  Some of the issues are familiar to long-term members, but Board of Directors’ goal is to produce increasing clarity and concrete action.  These thoughts are simply my own as an audience member in the session and a Board Member who is committed to an inclusive SHA.

Welcoming Diversity in SHA

The GMAC session revolved around, to paraphrase GMAC Liaison Carol McDavid, making SHA a welcoming environment to a variety of voices.  This is perhaps a more difficult thing to measure than mere demography of the membership, because it fundamentally defines diversity as a shared social and emotional sentiment.  Nevertheless, it is an absolutely worthy goal that consciously embraces curiosity about and acceptance of people unlike ourselves across time, space, and every conceivable line of difference.

A “welcoming” professional home ensures that colleagues with distinctive experiences and scholarly voices can have significant impact beyond little circles of specialists.  We should not underestimate the influence of even a single thoughtful voice, and SHA should be absolutely certain that such a voice feels welcome and supported and can secure a firm and fair foothold in our midst even if we disagree with their scholarly conclusions.  I very strongly believe that since the moment a group of 112 people gathered in Dallas in 1967, the SHA has been fundamentally committed to casting itself as a democratic, international scholarly organization, and we have long taken pride in archaeology’s capacity to “give voice” to historical agents who have been overlooked by other scholars.  I do not believe that this means SHA is not a “welcoming” professional environment, but some of our members are reluctant to become part of some scholarly discourses or SHA governance, so we need to systematically ask how we can create comfortable places and roles for all our members.  Many of the measures to fashion such an environment are apparently modest mechanisms that we can do now, and I have three general thoughts that came out of the GMAC session and broader discussions in Leicester and over the previous year.

Feeling and Being Diverse in SHA

First, I fundamentally agree that in North American historical archaeology in particular the absence of people of color inevitably risks compromising our scholarship.  Many of us self-consciously sound the mantra that the meeting seems aesthetically homogenous, which is an inelegant way of saying we are overwhelmingly White and do not appear to reflect society.  I am not in disagreement with this observation as much as I hope we can push it to some substantive action.  I do not personally think that any scholarly discipline actually “reflects” society in an especially substantive way:  that is, scholars gravitate toward the academy, academic production, and particular disciplines because we have specific sorts of creativity, experiences, and personalities.  Nevertheless, even within that aesthetic of homogeneity there are a breadth of class, ethnic, international, or queered voices who come to SHA through a rich range of paths, and a vast range of us partner with community constituencies.  During the GMAC session Tim Scarlett suggested that it may well be that one thing we need to do is more assertively tell our unacknowledged stories of difference to encourage others that their voices matter in scholarship and SHA governance: that is, being an SHA member is a mechanical act of paying dues, but feeling that we are each an important part of the SHA discussion may be different for our colleagues who feel most marginalized because of race, class, sexuality, age, disabilities, or myriad other factors.

International Diversity

Second, a question sounded in Leicester was what constitutes diversity as we move beyond the confines of North America?  As we grow and become a truly international, wired organization connected across increasingly complicated lines of space and difference, SHA needs to assertively work to advocate for all our members and the diverse worlds in which we all live.  Our international membership provides a rich way to confront Americans’ distinctive experiences of lines of difference, so I hope we will cast diversity in the most complex social, historical, and international terms that are compelling to all our members and make all of us feel welcome in SHA.  We are an international organization in a transnational moment in which many of us are increasingly threatened by the decline of jobs in the private sector, agencies, and the academy alike, and for many of us SHA provides a refuge and a voice for our collective scholarship.  We must always assertively and self-critically assess shifting lines of difference, so I do not believe what we call diversity will ever settle into a few neat categories.

Diversity as Good Scholarship

Third, like all scholars, we will continue to have standards of scholarly rigor we are all held to regardless of our demography or identity.  Some of our work will always be somewhat particularistic and descriptive, and not every project or research context needs to be focused on inequality or public engagement: lots of us need to do the fine-grained artifact and documentary research that makes historical archaeology so compelling in the first place.  Respect for scholarly rigor and difference alike breeds civility and personal humility that encourages talent and makes for good scholarship: multiple and often-dissentious voices constantly destabilize normative methods and narratives, while homogeneity simply reproduces itself and is at best boring scholarship and at worst socially reactionary.  It is absolutely true that we are all part of employment and educational contexts that have a variety of structural inequalities that risk yielding social and intellectual homogeneity.  We should be prepared to acknowledge when some standards hinder our colleagues, and in SHA I think this means always pressing to be transparent, respectful, encouraging, and clear about the scholarship, service, and communication done in our collective name.  We remain committed to diversity simply because a welcoming and creative intellectual environment produces the best scholarship.

Diversity as an SHA Value

Will SHA resolve all those questions I posed at the outset of this blog?  Of course we cannot resolve structural inequalities that took a half-millennium to develop and now have a rich range of international faces.  SHA is one professional organization, and while we advocate for a rich range of scholars and our members touch the lives of countless people beyond our membership, our mission remains focused on encouraging the scholarly study of the last half-millennium.  Nevertheless, in recent years the Board of Directors has undergone diversity training, a Gender and Minority Affairs Travel Scholarship has been created, and we have begun to examine the concrete ways we can invest the organization from top to bottom with an embrace of difference.  Now we need every SHA Committee to ask itself what its stake is in this discussion on diversity: If these moves are going to create genuine change in SHA, then diversity needs to be on the agenda for all committees and not simply the GMAC.

At the 1968 SHA meeting in Williamsburg, Kathleen Gilmore, Dessamae Lorrain, and Judy Jelks were among a very small number of women at the conference, which apparently included no people of color at all.  Today our membership is nearly evenly split between men and women and our Presidents have included 12 women, including 11 of the last 24 Presidents.  We continue to work to ensure that we are the best possible advocates for all our members because we carry an important role, and we should never underestimate the many lives each of us profoundly touch, sometimes without even knowing it.  While we will not resolve the inequalities that hinder access to the academy or scholarship, we can place these issues in discussion, embrace them as our core values, and persistently press to be a good example of inclusion, respect, and acceptance.  I truly believe SHA members have always been committed to a truly democratic scholarship, and I think in many ways we are simply continuing to articulate the values of many scholars before us.  It is important to keep articulating those values and doing all we can to move this discussion to the heart of SHA’s culture.

Nevertheless, it is still completely reasonable that we have some distinctive visions of precisely what constitutes historical archaeology (or should define it) (compare the historical archaeology course syllabi definitions at the SHA Syllabi Clearinghouse).  The discussion over what defines historical archaeology has roots reaching over more than a half-century, and the dynamism of the discussion over our field is a good indication of historical archaeology’s dynamism and growth.  As the field now stretches its chronological boundaries into the contemporary world, encompasses an increasingly broad range of intellectual traditions, and pushes its geographic horizons to every reach of the planet, that discussion may be as lively as it was in the 1960s.  The SHA does not need to impose a definition of the discipline onto everybody digging something we might call historical archaeology, and in fact the discussion of the rich range of historical archaeologies is more important than forging a universal definition of the discipline that encompasses every time and place.  Instead, we need to continue to promote a rich discussion that reaches across global divisions, lines of historical difference and contemporary inequality, and moments in time.

The differences in conventional definitions of historical archaeology are perhaps most apparent outside the confines of North America.  As we prepare for our annual conference in Leicester in January, 2013 and then Quebec a year later, it is increasingly evident that what North Americans call historical archaeology goes by a variety of labels in Europe, Africa, South America, or the Pacific World: post-medieval, modern, and contemporary archaeologies all describe some scholarship akin to American historical archaeology.  Historical archaeology emerged at roughly the same moments in North America, the UK (with the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology’s formation in 1966), and Australia (the Australasian Society for Historical Archaeology was founded in 1970).  All of these scholarly traditions push the conventional North American framing of historical archaeology in productive and exciting ways.

The most influential definitions of North American historical archaeology tend to revolve around the cultural transformations associated with Anglo and European colonization.  However, that definition looks out at the globe from the New World and has often somewhat ironically not examined the very European and African societies sending peoples to the New World.  For our European colleagues doing archaeologies of the last 500 years, the transformation into a post-medieval world reaches well into the medieval period and reveals dramatic variation from the Iberian Peninsula into central and northern Europe.  Pictures of Africa and Asia likewise have a historical depth that is not easily accommodated to a narrowly defined focus on European colonization alone.

Many historical archaeologists have focused on the ways in which emergent capitalism and colonization transformed the planet and provide an intellectual framework for historical archaeology.  Yet that sprawling profit economy was never utterly homogenous and integrated despite its global scale.  Capitalist penetration into New World colonies, Africa, and the breadth of Europe itself was inevitably variable across time and space, and archaeologists have particularly rich data to dissect the contextually distinctive spread of capitalism and local experiences of capitalist transformations.

The rapid growth of contemporary archaeology encompasses a breadth of research subjects that likewise stretches our conventional notion of historical archaeology.  William Rathje’s garbology studies laid much of the foundation for archaeologies of the recent past and contemporary world, and Americans have conducted a variety of modern material culture studies since the 1970’s taking aim on everything from electric cars to pathways of migration to wartime detention centers.  Archaeologies of the present-day world have been exceptionally active in the UK and Europe, where contemporary archaeologists have conducted creative, thoughtful, and challenging research on everything from wartime landscapes and prison camps (in Finnish, but video images) to Cold War materiality to punk graffiti.  For many of us this scholarship is intimately linked to historical archaeologies that have focused on more distant pasts and should have a clear role in a global historical archaeology that reaches firmly into the present.

The transformation to an increasingly global historical archaeology may be bearing the fruit envisioned by the very first historical archaeologists, whose January, 1966 gathering at Southern Methodist University was dubbed the “International Conference on Historic Archaeology” (my italics).  In 1968, SHA President Ed Jelks (1968:3) intoned that “Historical archaeology has much to gain in the long run from encouraging a spirit of concerted, interdisciplinary, international cooperation.”  Many of our colleagues in the nearly 50 years since the Texas conference have been committed to a historical archaeology that always thinks of global systemic relationships beyond our local sites, but we are especially fortunate to live in a moment in which there is a rich international scholarship of the last half millennium that is increasingly accessible thanks to digitization.

Indeed, that global historical archaeology may well be SHA’s next horizon for growth in terms of both the society’s literal membership numbers and the discipline’s more significant expansion as a scholarly voice throughout the world.  Historical and post-medieval archaeologists are researching nearly every corner of the world and bring rich scholarly traditions distinct from North American anthropology.  That global historical archaeology is profoundly shaped by the concrete connections made possible through online scholarship and communication across a wired planet, and it bears significant debts to the SHA’s own commitment to conduct international conferences.

The Society for Historical Archaeology is only one steward for this rich international scholarship, and that scholarship is inevitably richer for including a broad range of global archaeological methods, scholars, and approaches.  International historical archaeology provides increasingly rich possibilities for the scholarly growth of historical archaeology that is increasingly globalized, compelling, and intellectually rigorous.

Jelks, Edward B.

1968 President’s Page: Observations on the Scope of Historical Archaeology.  Historical Archaeology 2:1-3.

The ruins of this church near Plzen were used well into the 20th century.

The shadow of World War II and communism hang over the contemporary Czech Republic, but they provide an exceptionally powerful setting to weave consequential historical narratives driven by archaeological materiality.  Last week Pavel and his colleague Michal Rak took me and my University of Oulu colleague Timo Ylimaunu to see some of the numerous sites scattered between Plzen and the German border about 55 miles away.  Pavel and Michal are documenting the cyclical abandonment of villages in the region during the 17^th-century, when numerous residents were driven from their homes by the invading Swedish Army and in many cases left villages standing with a rich range of domestic material culture in place.  Ironically, after World War II the communists consolidated many of the villages in the region and razed those close to the border, some of which had been continuously occupied a half-millennium.  The architectural and archaeological preservation on these sites is absolutely remarkable, and scores of such villages dot the region awaiting archaeologists.  Nevertheless, as in many places in the world, the archaeological resources themselves are endangered, poorly protected, or not valued by some scholars and communities.  While we were surveying a community cleared in the 1960’s, a metal detectorist was rooting through the ruins, casting aside nearly everything in search of World War II artifacts.  At a remarkable medieval church ruin with 20^th century burials near Plzen, graves had been opened by looters seeking valuables.

Part of a 14th century village, this house stood until the 1960′s, when the residents were forced to move because of its proximity to the German border. The University of West Bohemia recently excavated this home.

The opportunities for global scholars to partner with Czech colleagues are immense, and the groundwork laid by Pavel and his colleagues—and their commitment to work with international scholars—makes such work much more practical.  Learning the history of a whole new place can be truly exciting, and living in places like Plzen can be much less expensive than many American cities.  Liberated by Americans at the end of World War II, Plzen also is especially warm to American visitors today, and reminders of the Czechs’ appreciation for American troops are all over the present-day city.   Many historical archaeologists bring methodological training, material culture training, and a commitment to public engagement that can expand central European archaeology significantly.  The scholarship that can be explored in the Czech Republic and in global connections between Western Bohemia and North America are enormously important to expanding a truly global historical archaeology.

Western Bohemia had an exceptionally traumatic 20th century history. At the very close of World War II, prisoners from concentration camps were driven on desperate “death marches” that claimed one in four prisoners. During one of these marches, 37 people were killed and buried in this mass grave near the current Czech border; the grave was exhumed and the victims moved in 1946. Michal Rak and the University of West Bohemia directed recent excavations of the the site, recovering 22 shoes and a spoon in the former mass grave.

Next year the European Association of Archaeologists’s annual conference will be held in Plzen and hosted by the University of Western Bohemia, so for those who are curious to visit the region and see these exciting sites this will be a valuable chance to visit and to meet our post-medieval colleagues in central Europe and beyond.  The world is covered with enormously fascinating places to do archaeology, and West Bohemia’s rich prehistory, medieval landscapes, and sobering wartime and communist heritage rank among those places to which historical archaeologists should turn.

Their common link is that they spent most of their lives in Georgia, the last of the original 13 colonies, one of the seven original Confederate States, and one of the centers of the civil rights movement.  Now imagine that the historical records of Georgia spanning nearly three centuries, including the details of all these famous figures and countless more people, were suddenly removed from the community’s reach.  This is in fact the quite startling threat that now faces archaeologists, genealogists, and historians who were shocked when the Georgia Secretary of State announced that the State Archives would lay off seven of its 10 full-time employees on November 1^st and discontinue public hours.  In his September 13^th press release announcing the closing, Secretary of State Brian Kemp (whose office administers the Archives) somewhat awkwardly and optimistically admitted that appointments to access the Archives “could be limited based on the schedule of the remaining employees.”  Should this proposal be approved, Georgia will be the only state in the country with such restrictive access to state archival records, effectively closing one of the nation’s first State Archives (opened in 1918) and balancing a $732,626 budget reduction entirely on the state’s archives budget.  Anybody wanting access to such records will be required to arrange an appointment amongst a flood of genealogists following new leads, neighbors documenting property lines, lawyers tracing historical precedents, and archaeologists researching sites throughout the state and region.

Kemp indicated in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the “Governor’s Office of Planning and Budget (OPB) instructed my office to reduce our budget by 3 percent ($732,626) for the coming year,” outlining the fiscal realities that face many archives, cultural institutions, and arts organizations facing a quite difficult financial climate.  In September, 2010 the Archives had gone from a five-day week to a three-day week as a cost-cutting move, and it eventually moved to being open only on Fridays and Saturdays before the recent decision to close the facility.  After November 1^st the remaining archives’ employees will be responsible for nearly every dimension of archival maintenance in an operation Kemp indicated is currently “unsustainable,” ranging from monitoring air conditioning in the building (leased for $2.7 million each year) to entering new material into storage to administering patrons visiting the archives on appointments.  Kemp acknowledged that this move essentially “mothballed” the state’s archives and reduced the staff to only monitoring the most critical state documents.  Since the State Archives received 14,624 reference questions in 2010, we can reasonably assume that even the three most energetic archivists in the world cannot manage even a modest trickle of those requests and the state will essentially provide no access to public records.

The news that the Archive would now be open only by appointment was greeted with a flood of complaints by a vast range of constituencies who use the Archives.  At a somewhat ironically timed signing for a proclamation marking Georgia Archives Month on September 19th, a back-tracking Governor Nathan Deal awkwardly indicated that “We’re still working on our budget proposals right now,” he said, “but the archives will stay open.”  Kemp cautioned afterwards, though, that “the governor did not tell him about his pledge before it was made. `If he funds it to keep it open, that’d be great,’ said Kemp.  The secretary explained Deal would have to `tell me we weren’t going to have to come up with a $733,000 cut’ in order to fulfill the promise to keep the archives’ doors open.”

This would be an exceptional loss for Georgia and the nation alike, and it risks taking fiscal sobriety to an exceptionally draconian level.  Archivists have pointed out that Georgia law does actually legally require the state to make all public records “open for a personal inspection by any citizen of this state at a reasonable time and place, and those in charge of such records shall not refuse this privilege to any citizen.”  Yet at an ethical level, archives make governmental processes transparent and accountable to citizens, so they are not merely research institutions.  Such a move essentially risks writing a whole state out of the nation’s historical narrative.  Such archives are not simply the province of a handful of scholars and genealogists; instead, a vast range of citizens documenting property transactions, legal actions, and community historical details consult the state’s archival resources.

A facebook page Georgians Against Closing State Archives has over 3200 followers today and includes links to Georgia state officials for those of us who can stress how important such resources are to myriad community scholars; an online petition has been posted on change.org; and the Friends of Georgia Archives and History have followed the discussion closely.  In the wake of the stunning cuts at Parks Canada and similar discussions throughout the country if not internationally, it is important for historical archaeologists and community scholars to register the profound consequence of such resources to all of us within and outside Georgia alike.  It is impossible to interpret the nation’s narrative if we remove one whole state and countless people’s stories from the historical record, so this risks being a profound loss for all of us who respect heritage.

The epilogue of Leland Ferguson’s Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African America, 1650-1800 is a disarming and profoundly thoughtful account of his experience of life across the color line and how it informed his scholarly career.  Ferguson’s book is justifiably heralded as one of historical archaeology’s most important contributions to the scholarship of African cultural persistence in the face of captivity, yet we risk overlooking the provocative epilogue that situates such scholarship in Ferguson’s own experience and in broader historical archaeology.  Uncommon Ground’s succinct epilogue provides an important statement about the politics of historical archaeologies conducted across and along lines of difference, and a discussion about those politics can contribute to an increasingly rich and reflective scholarship and diverse archaeological community.

Ferguson’s epilogue relates a story of him and a boyhood friend watching an African-American railroad “gang” laying rails in a sweltering 1949 summer.  An elder member of the group lorded over the workers, singing in a “rich, melodious voice” in time with hammers driving the rail, an experience that left the two boys “spellbound and envious.”  That fascination and envy with African America has often been felt by many White people who have been equally spellbound if mystified by a rich culture that has persisted with strength, creativity, and dignity in the face of profound injustice.  Many White historical archaeologists—myself included–have devoted much of our scholarship to illuminating African America’s centrality in American life because we share Ferguson’s humility in the face of the African-American experience, respect for this rich heritage, and conscious complicity in a half-millennium of anti-Black racism.

Ferguson acknowledges that he and his friend “heard and felt that workday performance in ignorance,” largely because they “had few black acquaintances and no black friends.”  When his friend addressed the singer with a racist epithet, the boys were soundly rebuked and felt “rejected and confused.”  Ferguson admits that through his “teenage years the alienation continued, and I alternately and somewhat arbitrarily enjoyed, scorned, and admired `colored people’ without ever knowing a single African American.”

That concession of fascination and admiration in conflict with apprehension and confusion is an exceptionally rare scholarly acknowledgement of the complications of life lived along and across color lines (compare Whitney Battle-Baptiste’s June 2012 SHA Blog for a similar example from an African diasporan perspective).  Ferguson found himself in the midst of the South during the Civil Rights movement, and he recognized his White neighbors “struggled to rationalize away the guilt of imposing or accepting an inequality so familiar that most had never perceived it as unjust.”  He acknowledges that he “came to see that the movement was reinforcing justice and compassion as basic American values,” and he began to comprehend that a deep-seated cultural heritage “beyond the eye and mind of the white majority” fueled the Civil Rights movement and rested at the heart of American heritage.

That recognition that racism was silently situated at the heart of American life and aspired to efface diasporan heritage provides an articulate coda underscoring the political significance of Ferguson’s study.  Historical archaeologists have produced an enormous volume of illuminating, reflective, and even activist scholarship on the African diasporan experience and life along the color line for which we can feel justifiably proud.  Nevertheless, Ferguson’s revelatory honesty is the sort of politics that we rarely see in print, and while many of us can honestly claim good works in our own local projects they often do not become public knowledge or accepted disciplinary practice, and they are not especially clearly stated as our common philosophical and sociopolitical interests.

Our pride in a rich African diasporan archaeology or our disciplinary attention to historical social complexity should not blind us to the need to ask difficult questions about diversity in contemporary historical archaeology, and SHA has the opportunity to lead a challenging and transformative discussion about the ways in which equity, privilege, and race shape every dimension of our lives, scholarship, and practice.  We have collectively done an astounding amount of good research and community outreach, but we need to articulate that work in ways that acknowledge disciplinary inequalities; we should situate SHA in conscious opposition to structural inequalities in broader society; and we must continue to develop concrete mechanisms to make SHA a welcoming professional home for a broad range of members whose voices can shape archaeology and impact the communities in which we live.  A historical archaeology practiced by a rich range of scholars that assertively examine global diversity is simply good scholarship that is true to a breadth of experiences and systemic inequalities throughout the world over 500 years.

Certainly many of the first archaeologists who gathered in 1967 to form the SHA were focused on British colonial heritage and the spread of European cultures and materiality in the New World.  Questions about globalization and social diversity gradually trickled into the research questions and discussion: Charles Fairbanks, for instance, soon led archaeologists into African diasporan archaeologies, and James Deetz profoundly shaped the discipline by advocating archaeological attention to the many peoples ideologically forgotten in historical narratives.  Many of us continue to justifiably focus on colonial European subjects, but that work is inevitably enriched by a rigorous and reflective focus on diversity, just as archaeologists examining race need to push beyond archaeologies of African America.  For instance, there is the potential to do an exceptionally interesting historical archaeology of race among White consumers who often embrace—and routinely evade—the privileges of White subjectivity.  This attention to social diversity certainly does not discard all the illuminating historical archaeologies of colonial European contexts, but scholarship revolving around race, patriarchy, classism, sexuality, or ethnicity can be embedded into many archaeological studies that sometimes are conceived by us as being somehow “outside” diversity.  The “questions that count” in contemporary historical archaeology simply must address diversity to be rigorous and challenging scholarship.  The weight of such scholarship can have profound effects on how many of our neighbors view our collective heritage and in turn how they view contemporary lines of difference, so confronting disciplinary and SHA inequalities and embracing diversity among membership and in our scholarship are important missions for SHA.

SHA has underscored its commitment to equity and diversity in the last year, with the ambition of being an increasingly diverse membership that provides a welcoming professional home for a wide range of scholars.  One step in this process was my participation in a People’s Institute Undoing Racism workshop in Washington, D.C. in July.  Gender and Minority Affairs Committee Chair Florie Bugarin attended the workshop with me and about 40 people who worked for a variety of non-profits and community organizations as well as neighborhood folks from Washington.  This is quite a different group than virtually any scholarly conference, classroom, or excavation site, but in many ways it would be a familiar and illuminating discussion for the many historical archaeologists who conduct community archaeologies and are committed to engaged scholarship—often across color lines and power divisions.

Many historical archaeologists have given thought to the complications of scholarly/community partnerships, but we have not often considered how racism shapes such relationships or how White scholars exercise privilege without even recognizing it as such.  A 2011 SHA Newsletter piece by Michael Nassaney and Cheryl LaRoche, for instance, discussed the persistent impression of racism on American life and the ways it and White privilege inevitably have an impression on historic archaeology practice and the very organization of SHA itself.  Anna Agbe-Davies joined this conversation in the Spring 2012 Newsletter, arguing that Nassaney and LaRoche’s column underscores the need to encourage both organizational change in SHA and individual good works—for instance, as we transform structural inequalities vested in organizations like SHA, we can individually take small but consequential steps like those often-invisible trips to local elementary schools, the energy devoted to championing equity in our local institutions, and all of our voices advocating for an archaeology that reveals the historic roots of inequality.  The People’s Institute experience framed a larger discussion about how power is vested in organizations like SHA, how a broad range of members with different degrees of access and power are served by SHA, and how all of our members can secure genuine agency and grow professionally within SHA.

These discussions have led to a series of initiatives that are intended to make our mostly unspoken disciplinary and SHA commitment to diversity concrete and increasingly part of our structural practice.

1. One of the first steps was a diversity training course at the June, 2012 SHA Board Meeting.  That training session provided an all-day experience for the Board and the GMAC Chair to begin discussing the specifics of what diversity actually means in the context of historical archaeology and SHA; what are our expectations for what a diverse membership does for the discipline; and how can we make diversity a structural dimension of all historical archaeology and SHA practice, and not simply a research niche.  I and Florie Bugarin then attended the People’s Institute Workshop a month later.  These discussions are simply beginning to move all of our disparate thoughts into collective space, but they seem an essential prelude to developing any genuine initiatives.
2. At the June Board meeting two Minority Travel Scholarship Awards also were approved by the Board, and they will defray travel costs for two students attending the Leicester conference in January 2013.
3. The Board agreed in June that President-Elect and Ethics Committee Chair Charlie Ewen will direct a revision of the Ethics Statement that will include an SHA Statement on Sexual Harassment, Gender Equity, Antiracism and LGTB Inclusivity.
4. Directed by Membership Committee Chair Barbara Heath, a member’s survey will be conducted in 2013 to secure demographic data more recent and somewhat more focused on dimensions of diversity than the 2008 Member’s Needs Report.

Historical archaeologists have long embraced an archaeology of peoples who have been structurally silenced and ignored as their experiences are effaced from dominant narratives.  SHA is committed to supporting such work because it is simply good scholarship that is true to our collective heritage, and working to mirror the same diversity in our membership is simply true to contemporary social life.  As Leland Ferguson’s Uncommon Ground epilogue stresses, lived inequalities inevitably shape our scholarship, but we have not often examined how our collective experiences become part of the structural fabric of academic departments, cultural resource management firms, or the SHA itself.  Many of us have had these conversations with colleagues for years on excavation sites, in department meetings, and even in the hallways of SHA conferences, asking ourselves how we can foster reflective transformations in institutions and everyday practice.  We need to keep moving that discussion into our shared disciplinary discourse and make it part of good practice, pressing to ensure that historical archaeology and SHA practice genuine equity in our scholarship and advocacy and welcome a breadth of voices.

Yet this year Cronon was compelled to confess that Wikipedia is now one of the single most comprehensive research sources on the face of the planet, and as I write today it has 3,961,053 articles traversing literally every possible subject from musicians’ biographies to historical events.  The pages are updated almost instantly; current events are updated in nearly real time, and each time an elder musician or movie star draws their last breath their Wikipedia entry appears to be edited before the body has cooled.  Wikipedia includes thoughtful if brief entries on astoundingly specialized topics, including entries on the simulated Nazi invasion of Winnipeg, the Bredon Hill Hoard, or the traditional Icelandic dish of Svio.  Wikipedia’s History Portal is systematically organized by period and culture groups for those seeking broader entry points, and many entries have links to peer-reviewed scholarship.  Nearly any search engine will identify a Wikipedia entry as the very first possibility out of scores of other web pages, and it is among the single most visited web pages in the world.  Strong Wikipedia entries provide a succinct introduction to a subject, reliable background on it, and links to resources containing more detail.  Some subjects are not completely amenable to Wikipedia-style linear outlines, but many of the subjects scholars examine can be very thoughtfully introduced in a Wikipedia entry.

What Cronon recognized is that it is foolish for scholars to ignore such a rich resource, because many people wade into scholarly topics and perspectives through their introductions in Wikipedia pages, and many times we need only a reliable overview of a topic.  When he wrote in February, the American Historical Association—the largest and oldest professional historians organization in the US—had a superficial Wikipedia entry, but now it has a thorough entry that includes an astounding set of links to Wikipedia entries for nearly every single AHA President since 1884, which has included George Bancroft, Woodrow Wilson, C. Vann Woodward, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich among its number.

In February the Society for Historical Archaeology did not even have a Wikipedia page, and we now have a brief entry on which we can build a more thorough introduction to the SHA and historical archaeology.  The historical archaeology entry is likewise exceptionally lackluster from a discipline that has produced so much insight into a half-millennium, and an enormous number of Wikipedia entries could be strengthened by contributions from historical archaeologists and material culture scholars.

Many of the scholars who founded our discipline remain largely invisible on Wikipedia, as well, which is especially disappointing since many of them are still active in SHA, many have former students who could very ably represent the discipline’s first practitioners, and we have some fabulous oral histories with some of the SHA’s founding figures.  There are now entries for a handful of these figures, including Ed Jelks, John Cotter, and J.C. “Pinky” Harrington among others, but certainly many more influential scholars could be introduced to a broader audience through relatively brief Wikipedia entries that would lead students, avocationalists, and even some professionals to the work of these earliest historical archaeologists.  Developing wikipedia entries for all the Harrington Award winners would be a fabulous class project for somebody out there.  Of the 27 winners, virtually none has a respectable wikipedia entry directing readers to each scholar’s work and scholarly importance.

Some archaeological sites have thorough Wikipedia entries, with 36 entries for archaeological sites in Virginia alone, including the sites we would expect like Mount Vernon and Jamestown, but also a few lesser-known but fascinating places like the Falling Creek Ironworks.  Many more entries for historical sites could productively incorporate archaeological analysis of those spaces to balance out the conventional historical pictures or architectural histories that dominant Wikipedia.  Indeed, a vast range of Wikipedia subjects have material culture if not concrete archaeological implications that remain largely unaddressed.

It would not be that hard to make historical archaeological insight a central feature of many more Wikipedia entries.  SHA probably does not need to be intent on coordinating a host of archaeological wiki contributors, but there is good reason for us to take Wikipedia seriously and recognize all the potential it has for historical archaeology and the SHA.

The SHA has written a letter to the Canadian Prime Minister joining our international colleagues including the Society for American Archaeology who have appealed to the Canadian government to reconsider the scope of these transformations in one of the world’s models for historic preservation, cultural heritage, and historic archaeology.  Let’s hope that by the time we meet in Quebec in January, 2014 the Canadian government will reconsider the breadth and sweep of these changes.