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Epilogue: Changing the World with Archaeology
- The University of Alabama Press
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Epilogue Changing the World with Archaeology barbara J. little And that’s when you knew this world can’t be saved, only discovered. And you knew things could be different from before. —Dar Williams, The Honesty Room Some archaeologists think that the field of archaeology is in serious trouble, having lost its way. William Lees and Julia King (2007) ask if publicly funded historical archaeologyis“worththeconsiderableexpense.”John Kantner (2004:2) summarizes a larger discussion by writing,“Intellectual fragmentation,institutional neglect, diminishing funding sources, and irrelevant curricula—all are problems that [archaeology] . . . is facing in the academic setting.” Lawrence Moore (2001:387) argues that “the soul of American archaeology has been misplaced.” Each of these cases indicates a sense of angst among archaeologists .Each is clearly calling for relevance and for better communication to convince a wider public that archaeology contributes to society today. Such soul searching provides an answer to the question of why we need books such as this one, specifically aimed at making archaeology into a field that takes action in contemporary society. A growing number of historical archaeologists are adamant that the field is broadly relevant and contributes to society inmanywaysbeyondthesearchfordetailedknowledgeaboutpastpeoples. As one of those archaeologists, Jay Stottman organized a session, Can Archaeology Save the World? The Benefits of Archaeology, for the Society for Historical Archaeology meetings in St. Louis, Missouri, in 2004. The title of that session raises questions of which world and whether it needs saving or changing.If the state of the discipline is as endangered as some of our colleagues feel, then perhaps it is the world of archaeology which needs to be Epilogue • 155 changed in order to be saved. There are plenty of examples in our professional literature that argue for public outreach and education on the grounds that unless we can elicit public support (and continued public funding), archaeology is doomed. Indeed, that is the impetus for Paul Minnis’s call to his colleagues to learn to articulate the value of what we do so that the voting “skeptic” might be convinced of the value of what we can offer (Minnis et al. 2006). Such calls have elicited some cynical responses from other archaeologists who call their colleagues self-serving and accuse them of caring only about their own academic discipline. I am impatient with such finger-pointing as I am willing to believe in the sincerity of practitioners who believe in what they practice. Indeed , who would serve archaeology if archaeologists were unwilling or unable to make a case for ourselves and for the value of preserving the material record which we study? Kim Christensen (this volume) argues that we must recognize ourselves as stakeholders in our own work. Recognizing our own interests and being aware of how they articulate with other interests are key to our work being both ethical and effective. I propose that as a field, archaeology is worth saving, worth doing well, and worth orienting toward contemporary problems. I don’t mean to suggest that, in order to be “saved,” all archaeology needs to be “action oriented,” as there is great value in basic ongoing research that has no apparent immediate application. We create an archive when we perform such research, and it is worth striving to make that research—whether done in academic or cultural resources management (CRM) contexts—as competent and state-of-the-art as possible. The changing of archaeology as a scholarly field aside, this book is about changing the world in a different sense: the need for scholars to take seriously both citizenship and the privilege of their positions in order to contribute in a positive way to our society. This book forces archaeologists to address the question: What is the role of archaeology in the modern world? Therefore, this book is an important part of the current movement toward creating an archaeology that is applied to current issues and thereby is fully part of applied anthropology , an argument Jay Stottman articulates in the introduction. The work described in this book demonstrates that things can be different. We can raise questions that documentary history has, accidentally or not, left unformed.We can pursue relevance while knowing that our quest for relevance is not new—the same insistence on relevance fueled the passion of the new archaeology in the 1960s and 1970s—but that quest and that passion need to be rediscovered and recommitted by each archaeologist who seeks to change the way things are. Several themes run through these chapters...