The scenario: a team of specialists are discovering artifacts from the past and attempting to establish their mode of origin. Tool-marks and other traces of human action come into view. Artificial patterns emerge and take shape from the material field that has just been worked, standing out as figures against a natural background. With experience it becomes possible to tell artifacts apart from similar-looking natural objects or features. A skilled practitioner can work out what kind of past human action gave rise to them and what sort of tools were being used at the time.
Is this a description of archaeological excavation?
No. There are other archaeologies, other archaeologists (though they may not style themselves as such). They inhabit worlds parallel to our own, dealing for the most part with different kinds of substances and materials, using different equipment, in different environments or sites of discovery. This article deals with one of those parallel worlds, where a kind of archaeology is routinely practiced; this is the world of the scientific laboratory.

Electron microscope
(Photo by dpape, 2009. Creative Commons Licence. http://www.flickr.com/photos/dpape/4057926815/).

Background
First, some background. Back in the mid 1970s there were three important ethnographic studies of the scientific lab, which radically changed our view of scientific work.
One of these was an ethnography of a protein chemistry lab reported in The Manufacture of Knowledge by Karin Knorr-Cetina (1981). It contained a vision of the laboratory as a highly artificial environment, full of the apparatus and instruments of scientific work but little if any contact with any raw material or nature. As a result of that disconnection from the material, she tended to characterise scientific knowledge as a social construction, somewhat unconstrained by any external material reality.
Another was Laboratory Life by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar (1979). The authors noted the sheer ubiquity of texts and inscriptive devices in the lab, seeing even large items of equipment like mass spectrometers as inscriptive devices for making figures or graphs or other kinds of readings. Texts to them were the principal kinds of artifacts constructed in the lab. Again, the focus is on the social construction of knowledge, through acts of inscription. Not so much on the material itself.
The third and perhaps the least known of those early ethnographies of the lab was Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science by Michael Lynch (1985). His study of a neuroscience lab is especially relevant to issues today, now that archaeology has gone through its constructivist phase and is looking more at how humans and materials interact with each other. What is very important about Lynch’s approach is that he directed his study at the interactions between scientists and the materials under investigation (as well as social interactions between scientists themselves). Conversations recorded pointed to actions being undertaken at the time and the materials being acted upon, including such things as lab rats and specimens of brain tissue that scientists were studying under electron beam microscopes.
Most interesting from our point of view is that Lynch explicitly used a range of archaeological perspectives in his ethnography of scientific work. The reason why Lynch found archaeological ideas so relevant was because scientists were themselves preoccupied to some extent, in their analyses of human tissue, with sorting out what was real from what was artificial; the identification of scientific artifacts was central to everyday lab procedures. The term ‘artifact’ (as used by scientists) refers to those aspects of evidence that were the product of scientific process.
Artifacts
In order to see what an archaeology of contemporary scientific discovery might look like, let’s see some actual examples of scientific artifacts – encountered in this case through an electron beam microscope. The following picture (not from Lynch’s study) shows a thin section of human muscle, which for the sake of this example we can call ‘natural’.

Field of evidence
http://moon.ouhsc.edu/kfung/IACP-OLP/APAQ-Text/W0-MS-01M.htm
Thanks to the IACP Anatomic Pathology website for permission to reproduce the image.
But not all the patterns visible here are natural. One can look at this thin section as we might do an archaeological surface or site. For standing out from the natural background are several artificial features or artifacts. Importantly, the arrows are not mine and the artifacts in question were not identified by me, but rather by the lab scientists themselves – the photo being used as a teaching aid so that students might recognise similar artifacts if encountered in their laboratory work.
1) Vertical bands of light and dark, forming a corrugated effect, caused by high frequency vibration of the knife or cutting block on which the thin section of muscle was sliced.
2) The horizontal white line (shown by the white arrows) is a mark left by the knife itself – in effect, a ‘cut’.
3) The undulating mark (shown by the red arrow) is a water mark caused by staining or dyeing, with the area above the mark stained darker than the area below. The line is wavy because it follows the corrugated shape of the thin section caused by the vibration already mentioned.
These explanations of the origins of artifacts are paraphrased from the more detailed accounts on the teaching website, which has many other photos of thin sections with examples of different sorts of artifacts frequently encountered in histology or pathology labs. In addition to the artifacts listed here, we also have to bear in mind of course that the thin section is itself an artefact, as is the blue colour or dye which helps to show the grain of the muscle so clearly, and so on. All these refer us back to the various processes of scientific work involved in the preparation of specimens prior to observation under the microscope, such as embedding, staining or cutting.
Recognition of artifacts is clearly useful to scientists; it is crucial that material traces of scientific process are not mistaken for non-artifactual or natural patterns. A kind of archaeology, bringing artifacts to light, is routinely practised. Discovery of artifacts in scientific work is not specific to the use of electron beam microscopes in biomedical laboratories. Scientists working with radio telescopes, deep sea cameras, particle accelerators, or any kind of scientific instrument, inevitably have to disentangle the readings of the material or phenomena investigated from those aspects of readings which are artifacts of the act of investigation itself.
What Lynch noted is that lab workers do not experience artifacts positively like archaeologists do – for example when we find pottery vessels, flint arrowheads or other artifacts from the distant past – but negatively as ‘intrusions’ or ‘distortions’ in the data (as ‘trouble’ rather than cause for celebration). To an ethnographer of science, though, discovered artifacts are valuable because they disclose the process of scientific work. The times when artifacts come to light – the moments of discovery as it were – are crucial moments in that they precipitate discussion and argument amongst scientists about what is real and what is not, what is natural and what is artificial, how the artifacts got to be there, how to interpret them, and what to do about them. All this is part of the practical process of making sense of evidence.
As archaeologists we deal with traces of past human activity, but we too leave our own traces on the material evidence we discover. Trowel-marks, boot-prints, knee-prints – such traces of our embodied presence, tools and actions tend to be swept away in the very process of bringing material evidence to light. That is part of the skill of archaeological fieldwork. Of course, all worked surfaces on an archaeological site (trowelled areas, half-sections, box- sections, bases of spits, trench edges, etc) are artifacts of the process of archaeology itself. But it would be a great mistake to take the presence of such artifacts to mean that knowledge thus produced is a social construction.
Look closely at any photo of an archaeological section and you will see that in addition to the ancient stratigraphy revealed there are also other marks – traces of the archaeologists’ own activity in bringing about the emergence of evidence. These might include:
1) machine marks, formed by the dragging motion of the blade of a JCB or other earthmoving machine during the removal of subsoil.
2) trowel scrape marks formed by repeated working of the section with the edge of the blade of a trowel.
3) incision-marks, made with the point of the trowel in order to delineate soil boundaries otherwise difficult to see.
4) surfaces so well cut and precisely vertical that all of the above traces have been removed.
Such material traces refer back to the various processes involved in the preparation of sections, prior to recording. Paradoxically, the more the section is worked, the less evidence there will be of that work (which erases most of its own traces as it goes), and the more the objective material patterns relating to human activity in the distant past will show through. The vertical surface of earth has been broken with the edge of the trowel in such a way as to allow configurations and sequences of layers inherent in the archaeological feature itself to be clearly discernible, while at the same time smoothing out marks left by the process of excavation.

Section through Iron Age pit, Heathrow
(Photo by Wessex Archaeology. Creative Commons Licence. http://www.flickr.com/photos/wessexarchaeology/322086296/in/photostream/)
Here is the point. The cutting of the section (an artifact of archaeological process), is precisely what facilitates the emergence and visibility of evidence about past events and processes. There is construction, in the sense of shaping and sculpting evidence, but there is also emergence of something that is not constructed by those practices. The same applies to thin sections of muscle or brain viewed under a microscope. As Lynch puts it, such artifacts are disclosures not only of the process of scientific work but also of the material or reality that is being investigated through that work. Without the artifact there would be no such disclosure, no discovery. This is knowledge, not just as social construction, but as the outcome of practical interactions between persons and materials.
References
Knorr-Cetina, K. 1981.The manufacture of knowledge – an essay on the constructivist and contextual nature of science. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1981.
Latour, B. and Woolgar, S. 1979. Laboratory life: the social construction of scientific facts. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications.
Lynch, M. 1985. Art and artifact in laboratory science: a study of shop work and shop talk in a research laboratory. London: Routledge Kegan & Paul.