The Case for Excavation Maximalism

Why you should dig as much archaeology as possible

The heart of archaeology

When I was around 11 years old my grandmother took me to visit an archaeological excavation along the river in my hometown in east Tennessee. I don’t remember much, but I remember it was hot, humid, and buggy as hell. I also recall the crew being pretty annoyed (and in retrospect probably hungover), dispassionately picking around hearths and bones with trowels between frequent pauses to engage interested passerbys drawn to the highly visible project near the center of town. I wish I could say that the experience left an indelibly positive impression on me, but that’s not the case at all. I had wanted to be an archaeologist for years, but after witnessing the miserable conditions and sorry state of the excavation crew, I decided that archaeology was no way to make a living.

I obviously changed my mind, but the fact remains that excavation is extremely difficult work, bordering on masochistic in its demands on one’s physical and mental wellbeing. It’s not for everyone, and that’s why most archaeologists graduate out of excavation and into cushy, well-paid, and managerial office jobs by their 30s, the series of promotions we call the "golden handcuffs.” Certainly, there exist many important archaeological roles that don’t involve excavation, but the practice remains the foundation of data creation and the core of archaeology’s public identity. Excavation has always been and remains the beating heart of archaeology, without which the discipline would perish.

Until recently, I had assumed archaeologists were on the same page about excavation being vital to the health of the discipline. But not at all! Progressive archaeology Twitter (or PAT, if you’ll allow me to invent an acronym) decided a couple years ago that excavation was a little problematic, primarily for two reasons: ableism and the curation crisis.

Arguments to excavate less

The ableist critique of archaeological excavation is pretty simple. Excavation is physically and mentally demanding, which can exclude “the differently abled” from fully participating. Thus, statements like “everyone should have excavation experience” or even professional criteria like fieldschool requirements are, in the eyes of PAT, fundamentally ableist gestures. I noticed PAT promoting this discourse more or less as soon as I joined Twitter in 2019, so I am assuming the meme has been around for awhile.

Aspects of PAT’s ableist discourse became enshrined in the peer-reviewed literature by a recent special issue of The International Journal of Historical Archaeology entitled Health, Well-being, and Ability in Archaeology. Of the contributions, Laura Heath-Stout’s most directly addresses ableism in archaeological fieldwork, taking 3 ideas from disability studies (compulsory able-bodiedness, coming out, and crip time) and discussing their relevance for understanding ableism in academic archaeology. I had never read a word of disability studies and I would wager you haven’t either, so here’s a brief explanation. Disability studies takes concepts and terms from queer studies in what appears to be a close conceptual analog between ‘queer’ and ‘disabled’. Thus, a queer identity is roughly equivalent to a disabled identity, just as a heteronormative identity is roughly equivalent to an able-bodied identity. The equivalence is overtly reflected in disability studies titles like Compulsory Able-bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Studies. Got it? You’re welcome. Moving on.

Compulsory able-bodiedness is the idea that non-disabled individuals “masquerade as non-identities” and are thus considered the “natural” type of person, a practice that “silences” and “overlooks” disabled people struggling to conduct archaeological fieldwork. Heath-Stout depicts coming out as disabled (again, an overt nod to queer studies) as a source of anxiety for disabled individuals, who must balance “passing” as able-bodied (analogous to “passing” as transgender) with coming out as disabled to receive accommodations in archaeological field settings. And crip time is an inside joke in the disability activist community, the phenomenon of disabled people often being late to engagements due to the constant maintenance that some disabilities require. Heath-Stout argues that the demands of academia, and especially archaeological fieldwork, are fundamentally at odds with the crip time pacing of disabled life. Given these aspects of being disabled in archaeology, Heath-Stout encourages all archaeologists to take a pro-active approach by directly asking those you supervise if they require disability accommodations, thereby centering disability within the discipline.

A second critique involves the “curation crisis,” a deficit of space, time, and money about which archaeologists and museum specialists have been ringing alarm bells for over 40 years. Curation professionals will tell you that the crisis was created by large archaeological projects conducted during the early 20th century that amassed warehouses full of artifacts that were never properly dealt with, having been left in field bags, decaying boxes, and general disarray since being exhumed decades ago. Some of the most dramatic examples are the enormous salvage projects conducted as part of New Deal era reservoir construction projects, but every region has their version. Managing a curation facility is a large part of my job, and my own personal curation crisis is a couple dozen bison bonebeds from which George Frison and his students collected several hundred thousand bones, many of which now languishing in the beer flats, field jackets, and tattered cardboard boxes in which they were placed 50 years ago.

PAT loves citing the curation crisis as a reason to do less excavation. The reasoning is a) we have a large backlog of unaccessioned collections already, therefore b) we should analyze and care for those objects before collecting even more. This approach is often called “collections based research,” or the practice of returning to artifacts collected long ago with new ideas, new theories, and new techniques to make them sing about the past once more. Collections based research can be extremely useful, not only because there are genuinely new insights to be learned, but because it provides a meaningful way to engage the archaeological record for those who cannot excavate or have stopped excavating due to life’s demands (like having children).

Is PAT right?

The borderline unreadable language of disability studies aside, I actually agree with many of the conclusions of PAT’s ‘excavation is ableist’ discourse. Is archaeological excavation ableist? Of course it is. Every profession is to some extent, but perhaps the position of field archaeologist is more ableist than say, librarian or archivist. Moreover, making reasonable accommodations to include disabled participants in archaeological field projects is both admirable and in many cases completely pragmatic. I’m especially sensitive to this issue because one of my academic mentors, Mary Lou Larson, suffered from a degenerative illness that bound her to a motorized chair for the entire time I knew her. Mary Lou was a principal investigator at the Hell Gap site, so her crews expended alot of effort on ramps, bridges, accessible toilet facilities, and other accommodations that ensured Mary Lou could maintain access to the site. They were accommodations everyone was happy to make.

Where we differ is the extent to which we think disabilities should be prioritized. The most extreme PAT voices would prefer that no project be conducted with the potential to exclude disabled individuals, whether those disabilities be severe physical ailments or less obvious emotional disorders like anxiety. Accordingly, PAT has argued that excavation should not be a required aspect of archaeological training. I disagree, and for what it’s worth so would Mary Lou Larson. There are plenty of ways to engage disabled individuals with excavation training, and archaeologists who struggle with excavation don’t have to center it within their careers after learning how it’s done. To each their own. But if you are unwilling to learn excavation and actively diminish the value of doing so, then I think you should reevaluate your career choices. Excavation is the only reason archaeology exists in the first place, and the discipline should place learning how to do it well and promoting its merits among its highest priorities.

Like PAT’s ableism critique, I again find alot of truth in the curation crisis. Few early archaeologists considered longterm plans for the massive amount of material culture they were removing from sites. That practice has saddled curation professionals with many artifacts currently housed in conditions that fall well short of modern standards. Our profession should absolutely prioritize grappling with that massive backlog of curation work. Where I disagree is how we move forward from here.

First, we’ve gotta rename this thing. I question the severity of any “crisis” that has persisted without major incident for over 40 years. At this point, curation crisis seems like more of a pithy, alliterative mantra than an actual problem. So here I’m renaming it curation drag, or the tendency for curating artifacts to take much longer than the excavations that produced them. The curation crisis was ultimately caused by a mismatch between the scale at which artifacts are excavated and the scale at which they are cleaned, catalogued, accessioned, and stored in long-term curation facilities. Often, those scales just doesn’t match up, primarily because of the slow pace at which most curation professionals work. Thus, I see curation drag as a fitting term.

Following this, we should absolutely NOT use curation drag as an excuse to stop or limit excavation, rather we should encourage curation professionals to devise novel solutions to reconcile the pace of curation with that of excavation. As a field, curation tends to self-limit the pace at which it operates in an effort to meet ever-changing criteria for “modern” standards. I like writing tiny numbers of tiny objects and piecing together old bones as much as the next guy, but at some point curators need to cut their losses and acknowledge that curating pottery sherd number 30,205 ain’t gonna change much. Ultimately, curation would not exist without continued excavation, so the onus of responsibility for resolving curation drag must fall on curation professionals, not on field archaeologists.

Excavation is ethical, actually

There are several sound ethical reasons for the case that archaeologists should excavate as much of the record as possible and, conversely, that ceasing excavation may be a dereliction of our most important duty. Firstly, mother nature and father time destroy the archaeological record much faster than archaeologists ever will, and archaeologists should be doing all they can to mitigate for this underlying reality. For instance, estimates place the annual sediment entrained by the Mississippi River at 500,000,000 tons, or around 250,000,000 cubic meters of compacted soil. Even if only .001% of that sediment eroded from intact river bank sediments rather than channel sediments (25,000 cubic meters), the volume of potentially intact archaeological deposits lost annually still exceeds by over an order of magnitude the volume of archaeological deposits excavated annually within the Mississippi River Basin. We should keep this basic reality in mind in the face of claims that archaeological excavation is destructive. It’s all relative.

A satellite image of the archaeological record of the Mississippi River Basin being slowly deposited in the Gulf of Mexico as new Louisiana land.

Second, calls to excavate less seem completely unaware that most U.S. excavations are required by historic preservation laws to occur prior to development, lest the sites be destroyed. If a pipeline or a wind farm or an apartment complex in California can’t avoid an intact archaeological site, the most typical way to deal with it is to pay for it to be excavated in order to obtain information prior to its destruction, a process called mitigation. I don’t have great numbers on this, but I presume that at least 90% of excavated sites are the result of this process. Perhaps we could all do a better job of promoting and disseminating these excavations to academic communities like PAT seemingly unaware of their existence, but the fact is most excavations are conducted in the service of historic preservation, not some vainglorious treasure hunt.

Finally, excavation is undoubtedly the best way to engage the general public with archaeology, and we should lean on it as much as possible to garner support for the discipline. Although the hot, surly excavation crew I first encountered in east Tennessee left a fairly negative impression on me, I certainly never forgot about it, and I’m certain that the hundreds of others who stopped by the same excavation never did either. There’s an irresistible draw to a hole in the ground that arouses curiosity in anyone of every age. What are they finding in there? Archaeologists couldn’t ask for a better conversational entry point to sell what they do to the general public, and we should be leveraging excavations in this way to the greatest extent possible. In fact, given that archaeology depends so heavily on public funds to function, I would argue that it’s our ethical duty to do so.

Wyoming children learn the basics of archaeological excavation from members of the Office of the Wyoming State Archaeologist at the Willow Springs campsite

Some best practices for excavation maximalization

Before you jump up from this essay to grab your shovel and start throwing dirt into a screen, I’d like to end on what I view as some common-sense best practices to responsibly maximalize excavation with consideration for ability concerns and curation demands.

First, and I can’t believe this still needs to be said, don’t throw stuff back into holes. Until the 1960s, it was common practice to discard animal bones and stone flakes from tool production back into excavation blocks to minimize artifact recovery, while ‘cool’ artifacts were kept. Most modern archaeologists would balk at the practice now, but there is a bothersome “no collection” trend among some Federal agencies who direct contractors working on their lands to rebury artifacts recovered during shovel probes (post-hole sized excavations), thereby alleviating the financial burden of curating artifacts. This practice both disturbs intact deposits and leaves a mess for later archaeologists struggling to figure out why there are displaced artifacts in postholes throughout their site.

Relatedly, at this point everyone should be including time and materials for curation into their budgets so that excavation projects do not reach their conclusion only to be saddled with an enormous task for which they are not financially prepared. Curators are correct that excavation is only half the process. The subtitle to this newsletter is “why archaeologists should excavate as much as possible” for a reason, and if you can’t excavate without curating the artifacts you remove then I would argue that your excavation is not really possible.

One way to alleviate the backend burden of curation is to make in-field artifact curation a routine part of one’s field site. This requires the purchase of a large wall tent or trailer in which to set up a mobile curation lab, where artifacts are washed, sorted, cataloged, and organized soon after they leave the ground. I started doing this as soon as I had resources to do so, and it’s been a huge asset to my projects. The practice has the added benefit of providing a role for disabled or elderly members of the crew, who can participate fully in excavation projects without having to excavate.

That being said, our in-field curation efforts have rarely been able to keep pace with excavation, so it’s important to develop excavation and curation practices that keep pace with one another. For excavations, I’m a big advocate of sampling smarter, not digging harder. In Wyoming, for instance, it’s now hard to justify exposing massive bison bonebeds that recover upwards of 3.5 TONS of bison bone (real number from the Wardell site) when systematically sampling the deposit in smaller excavation units has the potential to answer many important research questions. On the curation side, I am finding it increasingly difficult to defend some of the organizational minutia that has crept into normative practice, such as individually labeling thousands of waste flakes and bone fragments or painstakingly dry brushing bones that could safely be cleaned by submersion in water.

Finally, given the fact that more of the archaeological record is being lost each year to erosion and development, excavating sites or portions of sites threatened with destruction should be a priority. This practice is built directly into historic preservation mitigation, but it has typically not been a concern of more academically-oriented excavation projects. All other factors equal, focusing on threatened resources should be a priority for all excavation projects.

Most importantly, keep digging. They’re not making any more of this stuff and, after all, it’s our job.