2026-01-14
Sara Mohr
The American archaeologist Edgar James Banks (1866–1945) left behind a multi-faceted image as an academic, a public scholar, a film producer, and an antiquities dealer. Reading about Banks in the words of others and in his own gives the impression of someone who carefully crafted his image and sought to connect himself to high-profile actors and institutions to promote himself in the eyes of the public. Due to his dealings on the antiquities market, Banks was never fully welcomed into the fold of academic archaeologists, but he sought public recognition through selling cuneiform objects to some of the United States’ most prominent people and giving public lectures, the advertisements for which provide insight into how Banks wanted to be seen. In both of these endeavors, Banks reiterated professional appointments that were no longer active and sought out institutions that were recognizable and well-known. Banks later turned to the film industry, attempting to forge a connection with the glamor of Hollywood and its stars, where, as he did in his justification of importing antiquities, he claimed he was protecting the study of the Bible and of the ancient world from those who would rather see it disappear. Always self-promoting, Banks was a master manipulator of his image, leaving us today with a fractured image of the man and more investigation to do to better understand the depths of the man who is responsible for so many of the cuneiform tablets Americans interact with today.
2025-05-07
Sebastian Wang Gaouette
In 1984, archaeologist Bruce Trigger published his tripartite framework for understanding the history of archaeology, citing three main research modes: colonialist, imperialist and nationalist. This article uses Trigger’s framework to examine the history of archaeology in Jamaica, as an example of a recently independent former slave colony. The author finds that while archaeology on the island worked to reinforce first colonialist, and later imperialist epistemologies until at least the mid-twentieth century, the development of a nationalist archaeology in Jamaica has faltered since then, in favor of foreign-backed research. Furthermore, the legacy of the hierarchical British racial system in Jamaica, together with the exceptional marginalization of Indigenous Taíno culture on the island (compared to other nearby islands in the Caribbean), has resulted in relatively little domestic investment into the island’s pre-colonial archaeology. Instead, much of the highest-profile domestic archeology in Jamaica in the six decades since the country’s independence has tended to focus on the origins of the island’s maroon communities.
2024-06-17
Alexandra DiCiro, Nathan Mitchell, Ben Marwick
Julie Stein’s professional work was vital to the emergence and development of geoarchaeology as both a discipline and specialized community of practice among archaeologists, especially in North America. On the occasion of her retirement we interviewed Stein to document her reflections on the development of geoarchaeology. Her reflections present unique insights in the practical and intellectual challenges faced by a pioneering geoarchaeologist, especially as a woman in a field dominated by men. This interview helps to document the history of geoarchaeology from one of the preeminent leaders in the field. We present a brief summary of her education and career, including a summary of her key scholarly contributions spanning the development of geoarchaeology as a field. We present an edited transcript of our interview with Stein that includes questions about how she became a geoarchaeologist, her work with other notable geoarchaeologists, and her views on the role of geoarchaeology in archaeology today.
2024-06-16
Katie Meheux
This study examines radio and television broadcasts made by prehistorian Vere Gordon Childe. Although the focus is on the BBC, Childe’s work with other global broadcasters is also examined. Childe was one of the first archaeologists to engage with broadcasting, working to ensure that reputable, academic views dominated. He was involved in children’s education, the promotion of regional British identities, the education of military personnel, scientific advocacy, and broadcasting internationalism. Childe combined his radical, left-leaning political interests with his expertise in archaeology and the history of science on air. He used radio to promote both control of public archaeological narratives by a new generation of archaeologists and left-wing ideas about science in society. Examination of these broadcasting activities both expands our knowledge of Childe’s work and reveals the role that mass media played in the global communication of archaeological knowledge during the twentieth century.
2024-05-29
Travis Corwin, Elliot Helmer
In this paper, we examine the context of archaeological labor in American cultural resource management (CRM) that led to the creation of the United Archaeological Field Technicians (UAFT) in the mid-1990s. In particular, we focus on The Underground, a zine/newsletter that was widely circulated among compliance archaeologists primarily working east of the Mississippi River between 1993 to 1995. The Underground functioned as a community space in a pre-internet age by facilitating an open discussion of the positive and negative aspects of the CRM industry. Due to the nature of zines as a collaborative, grassroots media, The Underground presents a unique opportunity to examine labor conditions not just through traditionally published quantitative datasets, but through the lived experiences of the archaeological workers and organizers themselves. Furthermore, the material constraints of a zine as physical media allowed for its distribution to be more closely controlled and thus provided a level of security which facilitated more open discussion of labor conditions. The Underground’s position as a trusted venue amongst the archaeological workers was essential for its eventual role in the labor movement as a way to spread information about the UAFT and distribute an organizing survey on hourly pay rates and benefits. The Underground is an invaluable archive of both labor conditions and a major attempt at unionization in archaeology. Together, these historical data can contribute to an understanding of the changing CRM industry and provide an opportunity to see if the futures of archaeology imagined by the zine and the union can offer us a path to addressing our shared struggles.
2024-05-29
Chloe Rosner
This paper presents the questions and methods that steered our tracking, in the archives, of local employees of the British Mandate Department of Antiquities in Palestine. After reflecting on the causes of a lack of in-depth knowledge of local actors of archaeology in British Mandate Palestine and their near absence from the archives of archaeology, I researched their traces in the records of the British administration of antiquities retained in Jerusalem. The examination of the history of these archives, from their production to their conservation, with particular attention to cataloging and collection practices, enabled the identification of local employees in the management, practice, and displaying of archaeology in the first part of the twentieth century. Consequently, shaping and presenting an archive of subaltern actors of archaeology, this investigation allowed us to measure their contribution to the history of the discipline in Palestine.
2024-05-29
Maarten Horn
This article offers a cautionary tale about exclusively relying on official archaeological reports for writing histories of archaeological labour. It investigates a small personal collection of postcards and photographs by British field assistant James Leslie Starkey to interrogate the representation of Egyptian labour in the official reports of an archaeological project run by the British School of Archaeology in Egypt (BSAE) at Qau, Egypt, in 1922–23. The postcards raise two points that the reports contest or fail to address: the Egyptian efforts of setting up camp and the Egyptian autonomy in seeking out new areas for excavation. I argue that these discursive strategies were entangled with an early 20th century style of writing reports, archaeology’s restricted self-image as primarily a field-based practice, hierarchical structures and representations, and an orientalist and colonialist discourse that sees archaeological knowledge as produced by European ‘heads’, never Egyptian ‘hands’. Unfettered by disciplinary standards, these ‘informal’ postcards give a glimpse of an archaeological project whose work was more collective and comprehensive than its official reports ever made it out to be.
2023-11-22
Daniel Carvalho, Frederico Agosto
Histories of archaeology have, in the last decade, widened their scope of analysis. As Archaeology is seen as a network of practitioners, practices, ideas, institutions, and other elements, the possibilities for discourses on invisible elements in its historiography are increasingly surfacing. The present article strives toward an integrated History of Archaeology, uniting human and non-human elements. Tools and instruments bridge the gap between both, and will thus be analyzed, from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day (c. 120 years). For this purpose, 17 archaeological fieldwork manuals were selected. The tools and instruments were grouped in several distinct assemblages, reflecting their characteristics and roles during fieldwork. With this empirical data, some considerations on how tools and instruments are used, viewed, and discarded are offered. Ultimately, we will ponder how post-anthropocentric and anthropocentric histories of archaeology can enrich themselves, thus striving to open new research horizons for the discipline.
2023-04-20
Nathan Schlanger
The brief foray proposed here into the archives of French ethnologist, technologist and prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–1986) focusses on the proof-correcting process of the very last page of his doctoral thesis, published in 1946. The changing state of these proofs and the additions he penned to them, as made perceptible in the illustrations provided, serves me to highlight three interconnected aspects of history-of-archaeology investigations: the interest of archives-based biographical studies, the links between the history and the theory of archaeology, and, last but not least, the material and ‘intellectual technologies’ involved in the production of knowledge. Résumé La brève excursion proposée ici dans les archives de l’ethnologue, technologue et préhistorien André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–1986) aborde spécifiquement la correction des épreuves de la toute dernière page de sa thèse de doctorat, publiée en 1946. Les différents états de ces jeux d’épreuves et les ajouts qu’il y a apportés, telles que perceptibles dans les images qui illustrent cet article, me servent à aborder trois aspects interconnectés de la recherche en histoire de l’archéologie: l’intérêt que présentent études biographiques à partir de fonds d’archives, les liens entre l’histoire et la théorie de l’archéologie, et enfin les dimensions matérielles des ‘technologies intellectuelles’ impliquées dans la production du savoir. Mots clefs: André Leroi-Gourhan; histoire de l’archéologie; théorie en archéologie; fond d’archives; histoire du livre; Protat Frères; ‘technologies intellectuelles’; culture matérielle; chaîne opératoire