Putting the Soul into Archaeology—Integrating Interpretation into Practice

ABSTRACTThis article introduces a special volume of Advances in Archaeological Practice dedicated to the interpretation and presentation of archaeology. It provides an overview of several essays that came out of a session at the European Association of Archaeology Conference in 2017, which focused upon how interpretation can be implemented within daily practices of (cultural resource management) archaeology in a way that provides heritage value. We bring the arguments together into a call for a creative, interpretive archaeology that does not take compliance or academic publications as its end goal but will speak to a far wider range of audiences through the development and presentation of stories and narratives that truly engage and inspire people. We argue that this can be achieved by implementing “emotion design” methods that dynamically differentiate between information, message, emotion, and media, by working closely together with creatives, interpretive experts, communities, and partners and, ultimately, by integrating interpretation firmly at the core of planning processes, archaeological workflows, and our daily practices.

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Assembling Archaeology

10.1093/oso/9780198784258.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Hannah Cobb ◽

Karina Croucher

Keyword(s):

Resource Management ◽

Undergraduate Student ◽

Teaching Practice ◽

Cultural Resource Management ◽

First Century ◽

Cultural Resource ◽

Archaeological Practice ◽

Material Turn ◽

The Subject ◽

New Perspective

This book provides a radical rethinking of the relationships between teaching, researching, digging, and practicing as an archaeologist in the twenty-first century. The issues addressed here are global and are applicable wherever archaeology is taught, practiced, and researched. In short, this book is applicable to everyone from academia to cultural resource management (CRM), from heritage professional to undergraduate student. At its heart, it addresses the undervaluation of teaching, demonstrating that this affects the fundamentals of contemporary archaeological practice, and is particularly connected to the lack of diversity in disciplinary demographics. It proposes a solution which is grounded in a theoretical rethinking of our teaching, training, and practice. Drawing upon the insights from archaeology’s current material turn, and particularly Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblages, this volume turns the discipline of archaeology into the subject of investigation, considering the relationships between teaching, practice, and research. It offers a new perspective which prompts a rethinking of our expectations and values with regard to teaching, training, and doing archaeology, and ultimately argues that we are all constantly becoming archaeologists.

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