Peter Carne, Archaeological Services, Durham University, UK

Archaeolog: Peter, you are the manager of Archaeological Services Durham University and you are currently running excavations at Binchester, a Roman Fort just above the River Wear near Bishop Auckland. This year the project involves university students from Durham, Stanford, Texas Tech, and a host of other colleges and universities throughout the UK, US, Sweden, Australia, and Canada, as well as volunteers from the local community. So Binchester doubles as a teaching excavation. As a professional contract archaeologist, what is your take on teaching excavation practices?
Peter Carne: I think the key point about teaching archaeology in practice is that it is embedded in practice. The notion that you can make sand boxes with things in them and use them as teaching tools can be useless and counter-productive. You cannot teach excavation practices without proper excavation. So the research objectives of the excavation and the teaching are linked together, and everything including the teaching methods, excavation methods and organisational structure of the dig needs to be designed with this in mind. Archaeological Services Durham University has taught on a number of different types of sites. Some are easier than others, but the key point is that they are all different and this forces you to dig in a different way. A site like Binchester with large quantities of stone and fairly well differentiated soils is very different from a site where you have a series of postholes and ditches across which there is very little differentiation between the soils and no stone structures. The encounter with each of these sites will be entirely different. Naturally, it follows that the students will learn different types of excavation depending on the site type they learn on. We need to help people to develop the skills to approach the different sites appropriately.

There are various ways to go about this. One could, for example, focus on a series of tasks: troweling, drawing stones, taking pictures, sorting finds, whatever. There are some tasks that might be considered universal. However, by teaching these tasks as discrete techniques, you destroy the overall archaeological process, as the link between them is lost. If you say to people, “this is how you trowel”, “this is how you draw”, “this is how you use a pick”, you will never really get anywhere: at best, you will end up only with people acting as cogs in a machine, without understanding the link that binds them together. Essentially you are teaching people not to think, and to conform to a particular role in an organisational structure that is unlikely to be appropriate to different site types and groups of people. I think it is better to concentrate on how the skills are transferable.
Take enthusiasm, which in education is a key thing to keep up. Excavation can be very repetitive so people can get bored. As students, progress can often be slow, and without easily seeing the outcome, or with a lack of understanding of the purpose of what they are doing, boredom can set in. Some students start with the assumption that they are being forced to do manual labour: one student on a previous excavation said: “why don’t we get some workers to do this so we can concentrate on the thinking?” They had identified the core separation of archaeologists from their data that plagues the archaeological community today. I think that, instead of a heavy focus on particular techniques, there is a case for focusing the teaching on the golden thread that binds them all together. This understanding is the key driver in learning the techniques in any case.
Operating within the commercial archaeological sphere, we often encounter new employees who can perhaps trowel or draw, but don’t demonstrate knowledge of the difference between ‘cleaning’ archaeological deposits and ‘defining’ what they actually are . . . there is a creative element to excavation practice and that is the key to the golden thread, and it is this creative aspect of practice that you want to focus on in teaching. You can hire people who know how to move soil, but without that creative thread they don’t get the point of what it is they are doing, and of lot of their effort is wasted where it doesn’t contribute to the excavation as a whole. Creativity can be I think a very efficient process, encouraged by efficiency of practice.
I think we can make considerable improvements to methods of teaching on site, but without the golden thread or creativity, why bother? Of course, creativity is a very subjective approach. There is that observational filter and therefore recording the observational part of the excavation is an inherent part of the archaeological process, which needs to be built into the organisation appropriately. Everyone will take away something different from the dig. My role as manager is to govern the pre-given aspects of the archaeological process into the developing community, and to bind a kind of grand narrative together from the experiences of the individual participants. Everyone will be involved in the construction process, and take from it what they will to inform different communities in the future.
Through the golden thread we can teach transferrable skills, we can teach the process of understanding, and we can teach personal responsibility. The latter is caught up with this community of practice that binds everyone together with a commitment to the materials, features, and things we work with. We cannot be divorced from the material. We need to accept personal responsibility for creating the data, and let our theories and ourselves be restricted by that.
Archaeolog: So a fidelity to the material combined with the recognition of archaeology as communal, as co-creative, as tied with personal responsibility, as bound up with an understanding of why all this matters, is paramount?
Peter Carne: Yes. What I am in favour of in teaching archaeology, and in the practice of archaeological excavation, is the union of individual narrative development with the development of the communal archaeological narrative combined with validation from the external environment. I don’t think it is adequate to accept or validate the data that other archaeologists have generated, simply because of their membership of, or position within, a community. Accepting that different cultures / organisations / individuals excavate and generate data in different ways is one thing—accepting their self-validation is a potentially dangerous denial of personal responsibility.
Our archaeological narratives will be generated from our personal experiences, but as a community our communal experiences are the primary validation. The challenge at Binchester is: how can a long-term excavation community prevent itself from disappearing up its own ‘self-validation process’? Both the skills that are taught and the research need to be transferable—can our data ever validate or invalidate that within any other community within our culture?
There are a number of ways in which an archaeological excavation can be structured. There is a common hierarchical academic model, with the professor as director at the top, followed by the assistant director(s) who are his PhD, or former students, followed by MA students who are assigned certain oversight responsibilities and finally with undergraduates providing ‘labour’ in the trenches. This style of excavation completely divorces direction from the data. By placing people in predefined boxes all one does is reproduce academic/social relations: the archaeological resource becomes a backdrop to the validation of the hierarchy, the hierarchy becomes the origin of the emergent plot, and the sum of pre-given archaeological knowledge is reduced to the hierarchy.
Alternatively different teams on a large site can be granted autonomy and self-validation. The pre-givens are dispersed to individual plot lines, the ruins remain the backdrop, and a whole series of independent hierarchies can be preserved and self-validated independent of the data.
There is also a kind of model of mass production, in association with efficiency, and the designation of personnel in terms of pre-defined tasks. Here, there is a division of labour where one person digs, one person writes or draws, another takes photographs, and another studies ceramics. Here, the creative thread linking the processes is replaced by the validating system: the ‘interpretation’ is intended to be divorced from the data and imposed subsequently. The data and its classification can be predefined, and the opportunities for a site-based emergent typology are limited. Hierarchical imposition can happen post-excavation.
This sort of production model is often associated with commercial archaeological firms, although the risk aversion model is common in this field. The financial risk to any project is mitigated by the organisational structure of the excavation: the resources assigned to the project are pre-defined, and there is a non-flexible response to the extent of the emergent archaeological resource. The contribution of individuals is irrelevant. The data is divorced from the process, and the assigned resource defines the emergent plot. The data can be validated by a theoretical adherence to some standards, or membership of a club.
There are also excavations where structures may not formally be defined, where participation is more important than task designation, and the emergent plot can be prescribed independently of the wider community.
Archaeolog: So what then do you regard as the best form of archaeological production?
Peter Carne: The best structures and plot lines are those with knowledge and narratives based upon what comes out of the ground. This plot rests upon the premise that one maximises existing archaeological knowledge into practice, but allows what comes out of the ground to drive the plot. And as this develops one must acknowledge all the participants in the process—this is to lay the groundwork for a true community of practice.
In this I see my job as basically one of mediating pre-given knowledge and practice and filtering it. But this rests upon all the participants maximising their potential for engaging the data.
Archaeolog: We return to your golden thread . . .
Peter Carne: These methodologies need to develop within the communities we have here at Binchester. All the participants have a subplot, and these subplots can contribute to a grand narrative if they are bound together by the community that helped form them. A discussion / synthesis emerging from the hierarchy which pays due reference to each ‘specialist’ is inadequate. We all have our roles to play, and I hope these will emerge in response to the data and our engagement. Its easy for an insular community to develop a language that isn’t widely challenged. I would like a narrative that primarily reflects what is in the ground, not a hierarchy, not a detached series of tasks. And importantly, not something that is defined by having someone’s name on it in the end. If something important was found then it was found by the team, by the community, not by the individual. It is what was found that matters—everyone has a contribution to make here.