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cultural resource management on November 17, 2017 by SuccinctBill

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Archaeologists at the Universities of Arizona, California,

Berkeley, Chicago, Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale,
Michigan, Stanford, Florida, Illinois, or Pennsylvania are
controlling your mind when it comes to archaeology.
Archaeologists at these institutions are the ones you cite in
your cultural resource management reports. Like it or not, they
have great power over the way you see, interpret, and discuss
CRM archaeology.

They’re leaders in the field when it comes to publishing. Since

they publish the books and articles we use in our cultural
resource management archaeology reports, they’re the ones
we read. As the major institutions from whence most
archaeology professors come, they are also the professors
that train us. We add what we learn from their work into our
own work. Their thoughts shape ours.

How does this effect CRM reporting? What’s wrong with a few
elite institutions controlling archaeological theory? Doesn’t this
make it easier to keep our work current? Is this really mind
control?

Mind Control in Archaeology

My PhD adviser told me “There is no such thing as a new
idea.” She was right.

Archaeologists rarely think of new ideas. Most of the time, we

just repackage an idea generated in another field, declare
we’ve invented a new recipe, cook it up using a younger, more
famous chef, and sell it to the world as a completely unique
meal. The problem is: This prevents the sous chefs or even line
cooks among us from contributing to archaeological
dialogues. It also creates an intellectual palate that overpowers
archaeological thought that is not part of the mainstream.

It’s kinda like how Imperial Pale Ales (IPAs) have conquered
independent brewing. For the last few years, I’ve noticed how
every brewpub has a wealth of IPAs but not much else.
Imperial Pale Ales are not new but, today, no other variety of
beer is as well represented in bars in the United States as
IPAs.

What if you don’t like IPAs? What if you’re sick of them? What
if you’ve just turned 21 and your palate has come so
accustomed to IPAs that you can barely even taste the
difference in any other type of beer? It will take years of
declining IPA sales before breweries start diversifying their
production and you get the option to drink something other
than an IPA. That’s an archaeology-friendly proxy for what is
now happening in archaeological thought.

The concentration of epistemological thought in archaeology

prevents theoretical change, stunts growth, and slows the
evolution of our field. It also disproportionately empowers
academic work at the expense of CRM. This is interesting
considering CRM archaeologists are doing the majority of the
archaeological work in the United States but are not making
proportionate impacts on the theoretical and intellectual milieu
of our field.

In their recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s

Chronicle Review titled “How the Academic Elite Reproduces
Itself,” Andrew Piper and Chad Wellmon describe how
“graduates from a few elite institutions account for an outsized
proportion of high-profile published work” (2017:B7). The
authors conduced a survey using metadata on JSTOR and
found out that:

The top 25 % of PhD-granting institutions produced

89% of academic articles
Three percent of PhD-granting institutions (Yale,
Harvard, Columbia, Berkeley, Chicago, Cornell,
Stanford, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, and Cambridge)
produced over 50% of all articles published.
Authors from Yale and Harvard—just two institutions
— accounted for over 20% of all articles.

Additionally, PhDs earned from elite institutions are

disproportionately represented in university faculty. This is
something I’ve discussed before. Where you get your PhD
greatly influences whether or not you’ll get a faculty job,
especially at an elite institution; and, getting a job at an elite
institution greatly influences your publication quantity and
prestige. There are a few reasons for this:

1. Professors at elite institutions have even more

pressure to publish research in high-impact journals
and with in!uential publishers, increasing the
chance that their research will be cited.
2. Profs at research institutions teach fewer classes
each year giving them more time to publish.
3. Profs at elite universities earned their PhD from an
institution with a graduate student culture that
strongly pushes PhD students to publish in peer-
reviewed journals so they’re already used to what is
expected to survive at an elite institution and can
better make the transition from grad school to
teaching.

(DISCLAMER: I am biased. I got my PhD from one of the top

25 archaeology programs in the world and teach at one of the
top 10. I definitely have biases and a different perspective of
this whole situation. Take this into account as you read the rest
of this article.)

There are several other reasons for this concentration but,

given my experiences as a graduate student and now assistant
professor, I can say that individuals that are products of this
system are in a league of their own (Feel free to ask me about
my own experiences in the comments below or via email).

Piper and Wellmon’s research encompassed the whole of the

academe, but does it jive with archaeology? Signs point to
yes.

As discussed above, there are incentives to hiring archaeology

psychos who got their PhDs from elite universities. First,
they’ve already drunk the “publish or perish” Kool Aid and
have probably published a lot of stuff before finishing their
PhD. Second, they are overachievers who are likely to keep
overachieving as assistant professors. And, third, their degree
comes dripping with prestige and some of that prestige will
drip on to the institution.

We all like lists and the internet is full of lists. Here’s a list of the
top 10 archaeology programs compiled by some university
ranking website. There are many like it, but this is the one I’m
using. A major component of these rankings is “citations per
paper” and “h-index citations;” so, citations is one of the ways
this website ranks these departments. Unsurprisingly, four of
the top archaeology schools are also part of the 10 schools
Piper and Wellmon showed are responsible for over half of all
academic articles published on JSTOR.

*World’s Best Archaeology Programs (**2016)

RANK UNIVERSITY LOCATION URL

United
1 Cambridge https://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/
Kingdom

United
2 Oxford http://www.arch.ox.ac.uk/
Kingdom

University
United
3 College http://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology
Kingdom
London

United
4 Harvard https://anthropology.fas.harvard.edu/archaeology
States

United
5 Durham https://www.dur.ac.uk/archaeology/
Kingdom

California, United
6 http://anthropology.berkeley.edu/graduate/archaeology
Berkeley States

United
7 Stanford https://archaeology.stanford.edu/
States

Australian

8 National Australia http://archanth.anu.edu.au/

University

United
9 Michigan http://archaeology.lsa.umich.edu/
States

10 Leiden Netherlands https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/archaeology

*(https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/university-subject-

rankings/2016/archaeology)

**I do not agree with these rankings. My alma mater the University of Arizona and my

current employer the University of California, Berkeley are the two best departments in the

world. I’m sure you have a favorite that didn’t make the list too, unless you went to

Cambridge.

This table tells me two things: 1) Archaeologists know how to

read English, 2) Archaeologists read publications in English,
and 3) since we primarily read stuff in English and cite it, we
consider archaeology written in English to be the most
important. The next table shows that we love to cite what
others have already cited. And, what we continually cite is
created by archaeologists with connections to the top 10
archaeology programs (shout out to Michael E. Smith at
Publishing Archaeology for this list).

*10 of the most cited archaeology articles (2008)

TOP 10 U
AUTHOR ARTICLE PUBLISHED
CONNECTION

Lewis Willow Smoke

1980 Yes (Michigan)
Binford and Dog’s Tails

Lewis Archaeology as
1962 Yes (Michigan)
Binford Anthropology

Colin Archaeology and Yes

1987
Renfrew Language (Cambridge)

Style and Social

Polly Information in
1983 Yes (Michigan)
Weissner Kalahari San

Projectile Points

Hunter-Gatherer
Yes (University
Barbara to Farmer: A
1978 College
Bender Social
London)
Perspective

Calibration
No (Sheffield
Curve for
R.M. Clark 1975 didn’t make
Radiocarbon
the top 10)
Dates

Archaeological
No (Arizona
Michael Context and
1972 didn’t make
Schiffer Systemic
the top 10)
Context

V. Gordon The Urban

1950 Yes (Oxford)
Childe Revolution

The Chronology Yes (Australian

Atholl
of Colonization 1991 National
Anderson
in New Zealand University)

David Migration in
1990 No
Anthony Archaeology

*(http://publishingarchaeology.blogspot.com/2008/10/most-

heavily-cited-archaeology-articles.html)

Of course, we can always say something like, “Lists are just

lists. This doesn’t mean CRMers are under mind control.” Well
it does and it doesn’t.

Cultural resource management archaeologists do not have the

same obligations to do the “shout out” to other top scholars as
is common in academic archaeology. You all know what I
mean. That page that summarizes previous work but is
basically a laundry list of other scholars who have ever
published a thought that is similar to the one being published
in that particular publication. The “shout-out” is probably how
so many of these top archaeology articles got cited.

It also matters when the article was written. Most of the Top 10
were published at the start of the academic publishing
explosion brought on by desktop publishing in the 1970s—
1980s. Scholars, especially men, started publishing a lot more
articles when they no longer had to ask their wives to type up
their chicken scratch into a dissertation that could lead to
journal articles
(https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2017/03/27/thanksfort
yping/ [thanks @bruceholsinger for letting us know of yet
another unmentioned contribution to science by women]).
Also, the cavalcade of academic publishing, in conjunction
with obstructing paywalls from publishers, has made it much
more difficult for any scholar to know everything that is going
on in their field. This makes it much more difficult for a
publication written today to have the same sort of wholesale
impact on archaeology as one written in the 1970s, 1980s, or
even 1990s. Finally, archaeology comes in more flavors today
than it used to. African American archaeology, anarchist
archaeology, feminist, queer, landscape, public, diaspora…I’m
not even aware of how many varieties there are.

While it may seem like all this epistemological diversity means

there is diversity in archaeological thought, this work is still
coming from scholars at a few elite universities. As shown in
Table 2, eighty percent of the Top 10 archaeology articles were
produced by archaeologists with some sort of connection to
the Big 10 Archeology Programs—either as graduate students
or professors. If Piper and Wellmon’s statistics can be applied
to archaeology, it is likely that 10 institutions are publishing a
disproportionate number of archaeology articles and books. It
is evidence of how academic elite reproduces itself and how a
small number of scholars are influencing the thousands of
CRM archaeologists in the United States.

So, what do we do?

Piper and Wellmon suggest we go digital to diversify
epistemology. They state (2017:B9):

“What we are imagining…is a new form of algorithmic

openness, in which computation is used not as an afterthought
or means of searching for things that have already been
selected and sorted, but instead as a form of forethought, as a
means of generating more diverse ecosystems of knowledge.”

Instead of searching for what has already been said by the

heavy hitters, Piper and Wellmon suggest we broaden our
searches to take other values into account. For archaeologists
those values could include questions that are more
appropriate and would have a bigger impact on the
communities in which we work. The authors also state that the
goal of digitization is not simply “transferring print practices to
digital formats.” They urge us to integrate data, experience,
and institutional knowledge to “reinvigorate the intellectual
openness of the university.”

CRM archaeologists are actually pretty good at searching for

relevant information rather than tweeting about “who said
what” because we draw heavily upon grey literature and
archival data for so much of our writing. Census records are
better than a local history book; local history is more valuable
to our projects than a statewide historiography; state histories
are more applicable to our project area than theoretical
dissections of historiography. Good CRM reports are usually
more timely and specific to our project areas but the
discoveries we make rarely make it beyond the SHPO’s office.
Archaeologists at most of these elite institutions are unaware
of the discoveries made through contract archaeology
because this data rarely makes it into peer-reviewed literature,
which is what prolific professors are reading and using to write
their articles.

Nevertheless, archaeology needs to be more integrated. If

we’ve imbued the “elites” (of which I am one) with so much
authority based on our position in the field, professors need to
know what’s going on in CRM. So much of the research
coming out of elite institutions is based on very small data
sets. Similarly, large CRM companies are doing a lot of work
that never sees the light of day. Both academia and CRM are
largely funded by public dollars, which means U.S. taxpayers
are backing almost all archaeological research in some way.
How can we give them the most bang for their buck while also
diversifying the archaeological datasets that go into journal
articles?

Breaking the Archaeology Brain Trust

Epistemological change will be slow to come from archaeology
if it only comes from a small “brain trust” who studied at a few
elite institutions. I went to the University of Arizona and can tell
you that my experience there greatly influenced the way I see
archaeology. Doing CRM in Arizona did the same thing
because the companies I worked for had some of the best
archaeologists I’ve ever met. Well-educated, knowledgeable,
competent, intelligent; the time I spent in Arizona forever
changed me as a scholar and archaeologist.

As a product of the Arizona School of Thought, I would be

mistaken if I applied everything I learned there to my current
work at the University of California or my work in the
Caribbean for the Society of Black Archaeologists. Things in
Arizona are different. I am now in a new place, therefore, I
should learn how things work in this place. I had to unlearn
what I’d learned in Washington State and Idaho to survive in
Arizona. I am in the process of re-unlearning my Arizona ways
to survive here in California.

When we accept work from scholars at Oxford, Harvard, Yale,

Berkeley, Arizona, and other elite archaeology programs as
cannon, it becomes more difficult to see the unique lessons
being taught by the sites we’re working in other parts of the
country. CRMers also miss an opportunity to make substantial
contributions to the field of archaeology that could be useful
and more relevant than the most frequently cited articles in our
field.

To a certain extent, CRM archaeologists are already drawing

heavily on locally sourced research. That “Previous Research”
part of the report that summarizes what other archaeologists in
the area have done holds a lot of weight on our interpretations.
Their experiences shape our interpretations of our current
projects. We also cite relevant articles that include thoughts
from academic works—bridging academia and the industry.
Information flows from academe to CRM but professors rarely
cite CRM reports; there is not a reciprocal flow of knowledge.

It’s now time for information to flow in both directions. Here are
some suggestions for ways cultural resource management
archaeologists could break through the intellectual domination
of archaeos at elite institutions while also making a big
contribution at the local level:

Publish redacted versions of data recovery reports: Write

the (pre)historical context and the results sections in an
accessible vernacular format. Remove any unit locations and
protect the privacy of our clients (if necessary).

Electronically publish these reports on company websites:

Don’t charge more than $4.99 for any and all reports, even the
1,000+ pagers. It’s even better if you make them free. Make
them available on the company website as PDFs.

Spread the word through social media: Archaeologists are

cheap and love free stuff. Create a social media group on
LinkedIn where you can make these reports available to other
archaeologists and archaeology students for free. Widely-
distributed, free reports are much more likely to be cited.

Conduct data recovery projects using a company-wide

research design: I’ve been harping on research designs for
the last couple years because too much work in the United
States goes down with crappy or no research design. Surveys,
testing, and excavations should all take place within a context
that has the potential to build upon regional, statewide, or
company-specific research domains. The goal is to
accumulate data over time so that it can be applied to larger
questions like the ones pondered by archaeologists at elite
institutions and scholars in your research area.

Collaborate with universities: Ever wonder why professors

publish 2—4 journal articles and a book for every archaeology
project they’ve done? It’s because that’s all the data we have
to work with. Broaden our horizons with your discoveries.
Sharing data with professors publishing in your research area
has huge potential to expand what they know. And, it will
result in more holistic understandings of what’s going on in the
past because professors won’t be simply publishing on the 10
journal articles somebody else wrote about this type of site or
time period. If you don’t have the time to write the article
yourself, share the data and help a professor write it for you.

Use the internet to comment on the work of others: Blogs

are the new white papers in archaeology. Academia.edu and
similar sites host proper white papers, but those documents
are as stagnant as journal articles. It takes years to change
public perceptions through peer-reviewed journals. The same
mental gymnastics could happen in a month though social
media, blog posts, and associated comments. Discussing
issues online doesn’t have to be vitriolic. This blog is an
example.

We can keep treading the road we’re currently trotting,

allowing professors like me to publish journal articles so they
can be cited in CRM reports. I can keep writing articles based
on the research I’m doing rather than the research local
communities and scholars would like me to do. Or, CRMers
can write their compliance reports in such a way that they can
publish versions for public consumption. Cultural resource
management archaeologists can also use existing channels to
spread the word about their research so publishing
academicians can cite their work. This is one way we can
democratize knowledge in archaeology.

What do you think? Is your mind being controlled? Write a

comment below or send me an email.

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