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INTRODUCTION Stage plays can teach through aesthetic experience, creating settings in which facts, ¤gures, and historical relationships are depicted in an integrated, meaningful manner. Plays also can serve as tools for exploring the past, the archaeologist -playwright experimenting with interactions among individual roles and larger historical events, ¤rst on paper and then in production. The use of interpretive historical ¤ction in general, and play writing speci¤cally, acknowledges the limitations of mainstream theoretical approaches, but it does not reject them; on the contrary, the imaginative use of drama elicits insights into the actions and motivations of past peoples that may be testable through more conventional approaches. In this chapter, I illustrate this approach with a discussion of two plays I wrote and produced at the London Town historic site in Edgewater, Maryland. Archaeologists as Playwrights A report of some ¤ve hundred pages bound in plastic spiral binding, on top of a spreading pile of books and note-¤lled binders, occupies the right corner of a desk. A tablet with several pages covered in scribbled notes and quotations, many with accompanying marginalia, lies on the left corner and forms a small ramp to an over®owing stack of inbox/outbox trays. In the middle is a computer , its screen full of carefully worded comments and enumerated points. This is my desk, and my thoughts are equally jumbled. Years of university training ingrained in me the idea that archaeological research, inadequately reported, isn’t archaeology. And yet, here on my desk lies perhaps the most scrupulously documented and fussily organized technical report I had ever read, much less peer reviewed, and reading it has made me none the more 2 / The Archaeologist as Playwright James G. Gibb knowledgeable about anything I regard as worth knowing. The few insights garnered from the notes and books sliding eastward across the desk add little of consequence to the investigator’s observations and results. Critical deposits at the site were recently disturbed (I can take a perverse sense of comfort in that), and an underdeveloped research design foreshadowed disappointment. But even exemplary reports on well-preserved sites— replete with testable questions, detailed descriptions of appropriate methods and ¤ndings, and rigorous analyses—often hit a blank wall and fall in heaps next to earlier reports of greater and lesser quality. There is little or no real advancement in knowledge and understanding and, worse yet, no view of what may lie beyond the wall. What wall? The wall we have created, occasionally modify, and generally maintain through the questions and methods that compose contemporary archaeology and science in general. The formulation of non-overlapping categories of phenomena and the rigorous collection and analyses of data, although essential to the development of a reputable ¤eld of inquiry, create their own artifacts—walls, if you will—that impede further development . Art can help us scale the wall without permanently abandoning the ¤rmament. Scientists of all sorts resort to imagination, and science without creativity probably isn’t science. But science has limits more constraining than those of art. Taking a somewhat conservative view, I see what Ehrenhard and Bullard (see chapter 3 in this volume) characterize as an intersection of science, humanities research, and art, where art transcends experience. I argue, however, that art also creates experience that can be subject to analysis. Art produces not data but perceptions of reality for which scholars can generate expectations of the archaeological and documentary records. Archaeologists can draw together disparate data from artifacts (including, among other things, buildings, music, poetry, and paintings), archaeological deposits, and conventional historical documents and, through drama, posit relationships and processes that they can then test through more conventional archaeological methods. Play writing may not allow archaeologists to leap over the wall, but it might provide a glimpse over the top to see what lies beyond. PLAY WRITING Play writing and science can be inspired, but in the end, both grow out of what we know, or want to know, and what we want to share. And the idea I want to explore and share is that stage plays not only can convey what we have learned through science but can be part of the scienti¤c process itself, a means of constructing and re¤ning hypotheses about people, places, and events and how each shaped the other. The argument does not dismiss the power of ar26 / James G. Gibb chaeology and history to provide inspiration for artistic expression and to explore our common humanity: several of the essays...

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