Michael Shanks
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Archaeology and society

 

Spring 2004
Thursdays 2.15-4.00
260-008
This course is a core component of the graduate program in archaeology.

There is a dedicated collaborative class website >> click here

Topic
The course is about the social and political context of archaeological work. It is about communities of archaeologists and others who work on the archaeological past in some way. It includes an historical outlook too - the history of archaeological work.

Aims
to introduce the context of professional archaeological practice
to facilitate acquisition of the conceptual toolkit needed for navigating this context
to provide a framework and opportunity to become familiar with the literatures in archaeology that deal with socio-political and historical context
to encourage thoughtful personal viewpoint on important issues

Issues
cultural politics in relation to archaeology
the state and its interests in the archaeological past
democracy and pluralism
ownership and access
the art and antiques market
the conservation ethic
the concept of heritage
archaeology and nationalism
archaeology and colonialism
ideology critique and archaeological knowledge
reburial and other forms of cultural conflict over archaeological remains and activities
repatriation of antiquities
the workings of archaeological discourse - the discipline
the role of the archaeologist as professional, academic, intellectual, cultural worker, or steward of the remains of the past, in relation to other interests

Questions
what is the basis of professional authority?
how tied to nationalist interests is archaeology?
with the proliferation of different interests and claims on the the past, what grounds are there for resolution of discord?
can there be plural pasts?
is rationality/reason an appropriate single ground for pluralist interests in the past?
what constitutues ethical practice in archaeology?
is academic science separable from heritage management?
is the notion of cultural resource tenable?
is it appropriate to consider the archaeologist as an authoritative member of the public sphere?
what is the relation of archaeologist to audiences and constituencies?

Structure
The course begins with a session of orientation from MS. The following week will be reserved for preparation. There follows a presentation from MS on an issue that interests him – Archaeological practice and the boundaries of science.

The rest of the course will consist of six sessions of presentations from seminar members. These presentations are to consist, per graduate, of a 30 minute paper (3000 words) followed by discussion chaired by the paper presenter(s). The presenters will be expected to resource the seminar with photocopies, visual aids etc. The seminar paper is to be submitted for assessment.

Though graduates will only be asked to make one presentation, they will be expected to read for each topic. The topics are, in any case, interconnected.

Resources
There are no textbooks. A study collection of books will be made available in a mutually convenient location. Readings and other materials will be circulated as photocopies.

The reading lists are a beginning only - students will be expected to pursue their own literature searches. MS can help with any problems of availability.

There is also >>Shanks's blog - on all sorts of matters archaeological.

Assessment
This course in quite uncompromising and, frankly, demanding. The issues and literatures are broad. Graduates will be expected to read widely and deeply, to participate fully in discussion. This expectation is reflected in the assessment which consists of two parts.

One. Participation in the seminar. 25% of final grade will be based upon the seminar presentation and 25% on general contribution to discussion. For the latter MS will monitor attendance and active contribution (from week 5).

Two. An end of quarter unseen examination of 3 hours. Four essays, chosen from six.

Credit will be given for breadth of knowledge of relevant literatures as well as insight into key issues.






Schedule

Week 1 –
Thursday 1 April
orientation
>>M.Shanks Archaeology/Politics in The Blackwell Companion to Archaeology, edited John Bintliff, Blackwell 2004


>>PDF of the same


Week 2 –
Thursday 8 April
preparation

Week 3 –
Thursday 15 April
Archaeological practice and the boundaries of science (MS)


The seminars

on the following suggested topics

Nationalism and the state
Heritage, development, cultural tourism, archaeology
Science, discipline, and the role of the archaeologist
Ownership, access, the art market
Conflict and cultural politics
Authority and pluralism
Ethics and democracy

Other topics are possible – a final list will be decided after consultation

Week 4 –
Thursday 22 April


Week 5 –
Thursday 29 April


Week 6 –
Thursday 6 May


Week 7 -
Thursday 13 May


Week 8 –
Thursday 21 May


Week 9 –
Thursday 27 May


Week 10 –
Thursday 3 June
Overview




Reading

The bibliography is divided into topics and sub topics. The arrangement is somewhat arbitrary, given the interconnections. For example, ethics is related to both science studies and the crisis in ethnography.

nationalism and the state
Anderson, B.
1991 Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Second ed. Verso, London.

Ashworth, G. and P. Larkham (editors)
1994 Building a New Heritage: Tourism, Culture and Identity in the New Europe. Routledge, London.

Atkinson, J. A., I. Banks and J. O'Sullivan
1996 Nationalism and Archaeology. Cruithne Press, Glasgow.

Bhabha, H. (editor)
1990 Nation and Narration. Routledge, London.

Díaz-Andreu, M. and T. Champion (editors)
1996 Nationalism and Archaeology in Europe. University College London Press, London.

Hobsbawm, E.
1990 Nations and Nationalism Since 1780. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Kohl, P. L. and C. Fawcett (editors)
1995 Nationalism, Politics and the Practice of Archaeology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Meskell, L. (editor)
1998 Archaeology Under Fire: Nationalism, Politics and Heritage in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. Routledge, London.

Silberman, N. A.
1989 Between Past and Present: Archaeology, Ideology and Nationalism in the Middle East. Holt, New York.

Trigger, B.
1984 Alternative archaeologies: nationalist, colonialist, imperialist. Man 19:355-70.

Kaeser, M.-A.
2002 On the international roots of prehistory. Antiquity 76:170-177.

Richard, N.
2002 Archaeological arguments in national debates in late 19th-century France: Gariel de Mortillet's La Formation de la nation française. Antiquity 76:177-84.

Ruiz, A., A. Sánchez and J. P. Bellón
2002 The history of Iberian archaeology: one archaeology for two Spains. Antiquity 76:184-90.

Alexandri, A.
2002 Names and emblems: Greek archaeology, regional identities and national narratives at the turn of the 20th century. Antiquity 76:191-199.
the state

Arnold, B.
1996 The past as propaganda: totalitarian archaeology in Nazi Germany. In Contemporary Archaeology in Theory, edited by I. Hodder and R. Preucel. Blackwell, Oxford.

Maischberger, M.
2002 Greman archaeology during the Third Reich, 1933-45: a case study based on archival evidence. Antiquity 76:209-218.

identity
Friedman, J.
1992 The past in the future: history and politics of identity. American Anthropologist:837-859.

Gosden, C.
2000 Postcolonial archaeology: issues of culture, identity and knowledge. In Archaeological Theory Today: Breaking the Boundaries, edited by I. Hodder. Blackwell Polity, Oxford.

Graves-Brown, P., S. Jones and C. Gamble (editors)
1995 Cultural Identity and Archaeology: The Construction of European Communities. Routledge, London.

Jones, S.
1997 The Archaeology of Ethnicity: Constructing Identities in the Past and Present. Routledge, London.

Rowlands, M.
1989 Repetition and exteriorisation in narratives of historical origins. Critique of Anthropology 8:43-62.

1994 The politics of identity in archaeology. In Social Construction of the Past: Representation as Power, edited by g. Bond and A. Gilliam. Routledge, London.

heritage, development, cultural tourism


Alsayyad, N.
2001 Consuming Tradition, Manufacturing Heritage: Global Norms and Urban Forms in the Age of Tourism. Routledge, London.

Brett, D.
1996 The Construction of Heritage. University of Cork Press, Cork.

Chapman, J.
1994 Destruction of a common heritage: the archaeology of war in Croatia, Bosnia and Hercegovina. Antiquity 68:120-126.

Department of Archaeology, University of Zagreb.
1992 The War in Croatia: Archaeological Sites. Croatian Ministry of Education and Culture, Zagreb.

Hobsbawm, E. and T. Ranger (editors)
1983 The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, B.
1998 Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Kristiansen, K.
1993 'The strength of the past and its great might': an essay on the use of the past. Journal of European Archaeology 1(1):3-32.

Langford, R.
1983 Our heritage - your playground. Australian Archaeology 16:1-6.

Lowenthal, D.
1996 Possessed by the Past: Heritage and the Spoils of History. Free Press, New York.

Roach, J.
1996 Cities of the Dead. Columbia University Press, New York.

museums

Elsner, J. and R. Cardinal (editors)
1994 The Cultures of Collecting. Reaktion, London.

Hooper-Greenhill, E.
1992 Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge. Routledge, London.

Horne, D.
1984 The Great Museum: the Re-presentation of History. Pluto Press, London.

Pearce, S.
1992 Museum Objects and Collections: a Cultural Study. Leicester University Press, Leicester.

1997 Collecting in Contemporary Practice. AltaMira Sage, London.

management
Cleere, H. (editor)
1984 Approaches to the Archaeological Heritage: a Comparative Study of World Cultural Resource Management Systems. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Cleere, H. (editor)
1989 Archaeological heritage management in the Modern World. Unwin Hyman, London.

Cooper, M. A., A. Firth, J. Carman and D. Wheatley (editors)
1995 Managing Archaeology. Routledge, London.

McManamon, F. and A. Hatton (editors)
2000 Cultural Resource Management in Contemporary Society: Perspectives on Managing and Presenting the Past. Routledge, London.

science, discipline, and the role of the archaeologist

Foucault, M.
1980 Power/Knowledge. Harvester, Brighton.

Latour, B.
1987 Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Open University Press, Milton Keynes.

Latour, B.
1993 We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by C. Porter. Harvester Wheatsheaf, London.

Latour, B.
1999 Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA.

Law, J.
1994 Organizing Modernity. Blackwell, Oxford.

Meltzer, D.
1979 Paradigms and the nature of change in American archaeology. American Antiquity 44:644-57.

critique/reflexivity

Leone, M. and P. Shackel
1987 Toward a critical archaeology. Current Anthropology 28:283-302.

Clarke, D.
1973 Archaeology: the loss of innocence. Antiquity 47:6-18.

theory wars
Yoffee, N. and A. Sherratt (editors)
1993 Archaeological Theory: Who Sets the Agenda? Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

The Alan Sokal controversy - http://site.ebrary.com/lib/stanford/Doc?id=5002726

Gross, P. R. and N. Levitt
1994 Higher Superstition: the Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science. Johns Hopkins, Baltimore.

academics and intellectuals

Baumann, Z.
1987 Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Postmodernity and Intellectuals. Blackwell Polity, Cambridge.

Dean, M.
1994 Critical and Effective Histories: Foucault's Methods and Historical Sociology. Routledge, London.

Grimshaw, A. and K. Hart
1994 Anthropology and the crisis of the intellectuals. Critique of Anthropology 14(3):227-261.

Hamilakis, Y.
1999 La trahison des archéologues: archaeological practice as intellectual activity in postmodernism. Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 12(1):60-79.

Said, E.
1994 Representations of the Intellectual. Vintage, London.

Shanks, M. and C. Tilley
1987 Social Theory and Archaeology. Blackwell Polity, Cambridge.

labor

Gero, J.
1985 Sociopolitics and the woman-at-home ideology. American Antiquity 50:342-50.

Gero, J.
1991 Gender divisions of labour in the construction of archaeological knowledge in the United states. In Archaeology of Gender, edited by N. Willo and D. Walde. University of Calgary, Calgary.

Gero, J. M., D. M. Lacy and M. Blakey (editors)
1983 The Sociopolitics of Archaeology. Research Report 23, Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

McGuire, R. and M. Shanks
1996 The Craft of Archaeology. American Antiquity 61:75-88.

Paynter, R.
1983 Field or factory? Concerning the degradation of archaeological labour. In The Sociopolitics of Archaeology, edited by J. M. Gero, D. M. Lacy and M. L. Blakey. Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst MA.

ownership, access, the art market

Brodie, N., J. Doole and C. Renfrew (editors)
2001 Trade in Illicit Antiquities: the Destruction of the World's Archaeological Heritage. McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge.

Renfrew, C.
2000 Loot, Legitimacy and Ownership: the Ethical Crisis in Archaeology. Duckworth, London.

repatriation

Greenfield, J.
1996 The Return of Cultural Treasures. Second ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

conflict and cultural politics

Baker, F. and J. Thomas (editors)
1991 Writing the Past in the Present. Saint David's University College, Lampeter.

Crossland, Z.
2000 Buried lives: forensic archaeology and the disappeared in Argentina. Archaeological Dialogues 7(2):146-159.

Flannery, K.
1982 The golden Marshalltown: a parable for the archaeology of the 1980s. American Anthropologist 84:265-78.

Tunbridge, J. E. and G. J. Ashworth
1996 Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict. Wiley, Chichester.

culture

Bhabha, H. K.
1994 The Location of Culture. Routledge, London.

Brown, M.
1998 Can culture be copyrighted? Current Anthropology 39(2):193-222.

Shanks, M.
2000 Culture/Archaeology: the dispersion of a discipline and its objects. In Archaeological Theory Today: Breaking the Boundaries, edited by I. Hodder. Blackwell Polity, Oxford

>>online version
>>PDF


cultural politics – WAC

Bond, G. C. and A. Gilliam (editors)
1994 Social Construction of the Past: Representation as Power. Routledge, London.

Gathercole, P. and D. Lowenthal (editors)
1989 The Politics of the Past. Unwin Hyman, London.

Hodder, I.
1986 Politics and ideology in the World Archaeological Congress 1986. Archaeological Review from Cambridge 5:113-8.

Layton, R. (editor)
1989 Conflict in the Archaeology of Living Traditions. Unwin Hyman, London.
1989 Who Needs the past? Indigeneous Values in Archaeology. Unwin Hyman, London.

Miller, D., M. Rowlands and C. Tilley (editors)
1989 Domination and Resistance. Unwin Hyman, London.

Shaw, T.
1986 Archaeology and the politics of academic freedom. Archaeological Review from Cambridge 5:5-24.

Ucko, P.
1987 Academic Freedom and Apartheid: the Story of the World Archaeological Congress. Duckworth, London.

case study – WAC and Ayodhya

Rao, N.
1994 Interpreting silences: symbol and history in the case of Ram Janmabhoomi/Babri Masjid. In Social Construction of the Past: Representation as Power, edited by G. C. Bond and A. Gilliam. Routledge, London.

Hassan, F.
1995 Truth, morality and politics in archaeology: the WAC 3 Ayodhya case study. Institute of Archaeology Papers 6:81-6.

Colley, S.
1995 What happened at WAC-3. Antiquity 69:15-18.

case study - Stonehenge

Bender, B. (editor)
1993 Landscape: Politics and Perspectives. Berg, Oxford.
1998 Stonehenge: Making Space. Berg, Oxford.

Chippindale, C., P. Devereux, P. Fowler, R. Jones and T. Sebastian
1990 Who Own's Stonehenge? Batsford, London.

colonialism

Barringer, T. and T. Flynn (editors)
1997 Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum. Routledge, London.

Byrne, D.
1991 Western hegemony in archaeological heritage management. History and Anthropology 5:269-276.

Chatterjee, P.
1993 The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton University Press, Princeton.

Phillips, R.
1997 Mapping men & empire: a geography of adventure. Routledge, London/New York.

Pratt, M. L.
1992 Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Routledge, London.

Hall, M.
1984 The burden of tribalism: the social context of southern African Iron Age studies. American Antiquity 49(3):455-467.

Olivier, L.
1999 L'archéologie et la construction du présent. European Journal of Archaeology 2(2):269-280.

Olivier, L. and A. Coudart
1995 French tradition and the central place of history in the human sciences: preamble to a dialogue between Robinson Crusoe and his Man Friday. In Theory in Archaeology: A World Perspective, edited by P. Ucko. Routledge, London.

Schlanger, N.
2002 Making the past for South Africa's future: the prehistory of Field-Marshal Smuts (1920s-1940s). Antiquity 76:200-209.

Trigger, B.
1984 Alternative archaeologies: nationalist, colonialist, imperialist. Man 19:355-70.

center/periphery in the discipline

Olsen, B.
1986 Norwegian archaeology and the people without (pre)history: or, how to create a myth of a uniform past. Archaeological Review from Cambridge 5:25-42.

1991 Metropolises and satellites in archaeology: on power and asymmetry in global archaeological discourse. In Processual and Postprocessual Archaeologies: Multiple Ways of Knowing the Past, edited by R. Preucel. University of Southern Illinois Press, carbondale.

fieldwork and the crisis in ethnography

Clifford, J.
1988 The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA.

Clifford, J.
1997 Routes: Travel and Translation in the late Twentieth Century. Harvard University Press, Cambridge.

Clifford, J. and G. Marcus (editors)
1986 Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Denzin, N.
1997 Interpretive Ethnography: Ethnographic Practices for the 21st Century. Sage, London.

Denzin, N. K. and Y. S. Lincoln (editors)
1998 Handbook of Qualitative Research. Three vols. Sage, London.

Ellis, C. and A. P. Bochner (editors)
1996 Composing Ethnography: Alternative Forms of Qualitative Writing. AltaMira Sage, London.

Fabian, J.
1983 Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. Columbia University Press, New York.

Gupta, A. and J. Ferguson
1997 Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science. University of California Press, Berkeley.

James, A., J. Hockey and A. Dawson (editors)
1997 After Writing Culture: Epistemology and Praxis in Contemporary Anthropology. Routledge, London.

Marcus, G. E.
1998 Ethnography Through Thick and Thin. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ.

Marcus, G. E. and M. Fisher (editors)
1986 Anthropology as Culture Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

multiple/alternative voices/pluralism

Bennett, D. (editor)
1998 Multicultural States: Rethinking Difference and Identity. Routledge, London.

Ferguson, T.
1996 Native Americans and the practice of archaeology. Annual Review of Anthropology 25:63-79.

Leone, M. P., P. R. Mullins, M. C. Creveling, L. Hurst, B. Jackson-Nash, L. D. Jones, H. J. Kaiser, G. C. Logan and M. S. Warner
1995 Can an African-American historical archaeology be an alternative voice? In Interpreting Archaeology: Finding Meaning in the Past, edited by I. Hodder, M. Shanks, A. Alexandri, V. Buchli, J. Carman, J. Last and G. Lucas. Routledge, London.

Leone, M. P. and P. B. Potter
1996 Archaeological Annapolis: a guide to seeing and understanding three centuries of change. In Contemporary Archaeology in Theory, edited by I. Hodder and R. Preucel. Blackwell, Oxford.

Pluciennik, M. and Q. Drew
2000 'Only connect': global and local networks, contexts and fieldwork. Ecumene 7(1):67-104.

Vizenor, G.
1996 Bone courts: the rights and narrative representation of tribal bones. In Contemporary Archaeology in Theory, edited by I. Hodder and R. Preucel. Blackwell, Oxford.

relativism

Binford, L.
1987 Data, relativism and archaeological science. Man 22:391-404.

LampeterArchaeologyWorkshop
1997 Relativism, objectivity and the politics of the past. Archaeological Dialogues 4:164-75.

Trigger, B.
1989 Hyperrelativism, responsibility and the social sciences. Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 26:776-97.

ethics, values and democracy

Carman, J.
1996 Valuing Ancient Things: Archaeology and Law. Leicester University press/Cassell, London.

Shanks, M. and C. Tilley
1992 ReConstructing Archaeology: Theory and Practice. Second ed. New Studies in Archaeology. Routledge, London.

Gardiner, M.
1996 Alterity and ethics. A dialogical perspective. Theory, Culture and Society 13(2):121-143.

Green, E. L. (editor)
1984 Ethics and Values in Archaeology. Free Press, New York.

Jones, D. and R. Harris
1998 Archaeological human remains: scientific, cultural and ethical considerations. Current Anthropology 39(2):253-264.

Klesert, A. and S. Powell
1993 A perspective on ethics and the reburial controversy. American Antiquity 58:348-354.

Lynott, M. and A. Wylie (editors)
1995 Ethics in American Archaeology: Challenges for the 1990s. Society for American Archaeology, Washington DC.

Norris, C.
1995 Culture, criticism and communal values: on the ethics of inquiry. In Theorizing Culture: an Interdisciplinary Critique after Postmodernism, edited by B. A. S. Allan, pp. 5-40. UCL Press, London.

Vitelli, K.
1996 Archaeological Ethics: Readings from Archaeology Magazine. Altamira, Walnut Creek.

Bauman, Z.
1993 Postmodern Ethics. Blackwell, Oxford.

Bauman, Z.
1995 Life in Fragments : Essays in Postmodern Morality. Blackwell, Oxford.

Habermas
Calhoun, C. (editor)
1992 Habermas and the Public Sphere. MIT Press, Cambridge MA.

Dews, P. (editor)
1999 Habermas: a Critical Reader. Blackwell, Oxford.

White, S. K. (editor)
1995 The Cambridge Companion to Habermas. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.