The Craft of Archaeology

TLDR

Archaeology is increasingly framed as a cultural and political practice, yet many scholars lack guidance on integrating craft principles that challenge the traditional separation of reasoning and execution. The authors aim to reconceptualize archaeology as a unified craft that blends hand, heart, and mind, thereby resolving alienation and fostering collaborative cultural production. They argue against standardizing archaeology into a cookbook, instead offering a conceptual framework that resists alienation by treating the discipline as a holistic craft.

Abstract

The idea of archaeology as craft challenges the separation of reasoning and execution that characterizes the field today. The Arts and Crafts Movement of the late nineteenth century established craftwork as an aesthetic of opposition. We establish craft in a Marxian critique of alienated labor, and we propose a unified practice of hand, heart, and mind for archaeology. The debates engendered by postprocessual archaeology have firmly situated archaeology in the present as a cultural and political practice. Many, however, still do not know how to work with these ideas. We argue that a resolution to this dilemma lies in thinking of archaeology as a craft. This resolution does not provide a method, or a cookbook, for the practice of archaeology, as indeed the core of our argument is that attempts at such standardization lie at the heart of the alienation of archaeology. Rather, we wish to consider archaeology as a mode of cultural productión, a unified method practiced by archaeologist, “client” public, and contemporary society.