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Authority and the production of knowledge in archaeology
Get PDFThis thesis examines the role of authority in the production of archaeological knowledge. It examines how fluid ideas and observations formed in the field become authoritative, factual, solid archaeological products, like scientific texts, reconstructions or museum displays. It asks, what makes a person, a thing or an account of history something that is authoritative? What makes someone an authority on the past? What is archaeological authority? This thesis deconstructs and exposes authority in archaeological practice. It targets how practitioners of archaeology actively enact, construct and implement authority in the process of producing knowledge. Formal representations of the past rely heavily on an underlying notion of the ‘authoritative account’. The entire process of reconstructing the past in archaeology is dependent on individuals and institutions existing as authorities, who actively or passively imply that artefacts, sites and final interpretations are ‘authentic’ or have ‘fidelity’ to the past. This study examines how authority and acts of legitimation are employed and distributed through the medium of science, and how they need to be actively performed in order to acquire and maintain status. This thesis not only argues that authority is embedded in every stage of the archaeological process, but importantly, it identifies how this authority manifests through the medium of scientific acts.
This thesis is structured around two comparative case studies: one case of professional archaeology and one case of alternative archaeology. Both are archaeological sites that produce their own ‘authoritative’ accounts of the past through practices, publications and presentations. The first case is the professional archaeological project of Çatalhöyük in the Republic of Turkey, under the direction of Ian Hodder at Stanford University. This case offers insights about how the processes of inscription, translation and blackboxing establish and maintain authority in archaeological practice. It also addresses how physical and intellectual space, as well as issues of access in localised knowledge-producing social arenas, affect archaeological authority. The second case is the controversial pseudoarchaeological project in Visoko, Bosnia, commonly referred to as the Bosnian Pyramids. This project, under the direction of amateur archaeologist Semir Osmanagić, has successfully created an account of prehistory that has been received by the general Bosnian public as authoritative, despite objections by the professional archaeological community. This case demonstrates how authority can be constructed, mimicked and performed by drawing on academic arenas of scientific practice and by eager public participation. Specifically, this case study highlights the importance of socio-politics, authoritative institutions and performative behaviour in the construction of archaeological authority
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Towards the collaborative museum? Social media, participation, disciplinary experts and the public in the contemporary museum
Get PDFThis thesis examines the use of social media by museums aiming to establish collaborative relationships with the public. Social media platforms have been widely espoused as transformative in allowing diverse, new or previously excluded audiences to enter into egalitarian, participatory relationships with museums. This thesis deconstructs the concepts of participation and collaboration and identifies the various factors that constrain the extent to which social media enables participatory relationships between previously unequal actors. These factors include the historical disciplinary aims and cultural authority of museums, persistent social inequalities, and the motivations of social media followers. It elucidates crucial questions such as, are various publics enabled to participate on an equal level with each other and with museums? Who benefits from collaborative projects in general and which parties benefit from the use of social media in particular? What are the factors that limit the establishment of collaborative practice? And, conversely, what are the factors that define truly collaborative practice?
This research examines museums’ use of and discourses surrounding social media as well as social media followers’ motivations for engaging with museums online. A large body of quantitative and qualitative data gained through in-depth web-based surveys is analysed, primarily using critical discourse analysis, and informed by other critical orientations including media archaeology and the sociology of expertise. The analysis indicates that museums consider social media to be a transformative, democratising technology. However, museums’ acceptance of technologically determinist arguments significantly inhibits positive societal change and the extent to which collaborative relationships can be established with various publics.
This research contributes significantly to the existing archaeological and museum studies literature by providing a theoretically and empirically informed critical analysis of the prevailing positive discourses surrounding social media and participation. It has important practical implications for museums in arguing that targeted, critically informed and ethically aware projects are necessary to achieve situations resembling ‘collaboration’. It provides a significant body of data that will inform the formulation and continuation of collaborative projects in museums. Furthermore, it informs broader archaeological debates on involving various publics in archaeological practice. This thesis also demonstrates the importance and effectiveness of critical discourse analysis and related critical approaches for analysing large bodies of qualitative data
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Culture après le déluge: heritage ecology after disaster
Get PDFThis PhD dissertation examines the relationships between cultural heritage and the environment, focusing specifically on the devastation and rebuilding of New Orleans, Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Departing from conventional approaches to the natural world (such as documentation- and conservation-based approaches), this thesis adopts a developmental-systems based approach to cultural heritage in order to construct a new way of interpreting it, within the specific context of natural disaster. This new approach, termed ‘heritage ecology’, reinterprets cultural heritage in two ways: first, as a physical assemblage of sites, materials, traditions, beliefs, and practices that are constructed in significant ways by their natural environments; and second, as a metaphorical ecosystem which impacts back on the assessment and construction of that natural environment in turn.
In order to construct this approach, the thesis poses three interrelated questions: how is cultural heritage transformed as a result of disaster, how do societies rebuild their heritage after disaster, and how does heritage contribute to the rebuilding process? Examining a rebuilding process in real-time provides a unique window on these processes; events and developments in New Orleans taken from the first four years of recovery (2005-2009) suggest that prior understandings of how societies rebuild themselves after disaster have neglected crucial aspects of cultural heritage that are integral to that process. The examination of data from the case study -- data of diverse forms, such as historiography, the culinary arts, music, the built environment, and memorial sites and landscapes -- reveals the limitations of traditional approaches to heritage and prompts a reassessment of a range of issues central to heritage research, issues such as materiality, authenticity, and commodification. This study moreover incorporates into heritage research concepts previously unconsidered, such as infrastructure and policy. In the coming century of global climate change and increased environmental hazards, this last theme will become increasingly central to heritage policy and research; the dissertation concludes accordingly, with a reflection on contingency and future disaster
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Assumptions and interpretations in the study of the Great Rebuilding
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Artefacts as Categories: A Study of Ceramic Variability in Central India, by Daniel Miller
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Haliksa'i: UNM Contributions to Anthropology, by the University of New Mexico Anthropology Society
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Sweet Track to Glastonbury: The Somerset Levels in Prehistory, by John Coles and Bryony Coles
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