Often Fun, Usually Messy: Fieldwork, Recording and Higher Orders of Things (original) (raw)

Abstract

"This paper has had a long gestation which began in 1997 as an article Chris Cumberpatch and I (Cumberpatch and Thorpe 1997) began to put together where we questioned the focus of the debate, played out in the pages of Antiquity, between Fekri Hassan and Ian Hodder (Hassan 1997; Hodder 1997, 1998). Later, in 2004, I was fortunate enough to be asked to contribute an overview paper to the proceedings of the Stratigraphy Conference held at York in 2001. Unfortunately the first paper was never completely finished and the publication of the Stratigraphy Conference proceedings has been cancelled. This chapter then draws together aspects of both papers, as the debate is still one with relevance today and includes an expansion of my thinking (up to June 2010) on other areas addressed by my original paper given in the Reconsidering the on-site relationship between subject, object, theory and practice session of the Theoretical Archaeology Group conference in at York in 2007. In the following paper I agree with Shanks and McGuire (1996), Berggren and Hodder (2003) and Chadwick (2003) that for the actual excavator and specialist much current practice is characterised by alienation from the process of interpretation. Where I disagree is with the attribution of the causes of this alienation. In my view the causes do not lie in a tradition of pseudo-objectivity within British Archaeology, nor are they to be found in revisionist and partial readings of the history of the development of approaches to archaeological fieldwork in Britain. Alienation from the process of interpretation is not a consequence of processual field methodology, nor the specific absence of a post-processual field method. Instead, I argue that the current state of archaeological field practice in Britain is due almost entirely to the social, political and economic context of the production of archaeological data. I conclude that any attempt to (re)empower the interpretive arm of the excavator must actively engage with and address, first and foremost, these circumstances "

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