I was tempted to title our article, “protracted conversational barking” in honor of this hilariously cantankerous quote from Petrie. Dan and I just published a new article in the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology titled Dig Houses, Dwelling, and Knowledge Production in Archaeology which was probably the most fun I’ve ever had writing an article. Here’s a link to the final draft, as it seems that most people don’t have access to JCA yet, and I couldn’t find the budget to publish it OA. Sorry.
Sadly a lot of the historical research did not quite make it into the article, but we managed to get in a wide range of archaeological dig houses, from Petrie’s tomb to the “palace” headquarters of the Tell Asmar excavation, barasti huts in Bahrain, Villa Ariadne and Harriet Boyd Hawes’ sanctified bone yard. We also looked at modern dig houses, often hotels, and tried to make a case for more lively places of knowledge production on excavations. And we sneaked in a bit about dig houses hearkening to Goffman’s total institution. But maybe that’s just Çatalhöyük.
Speaking of Çatalhöyük, our case study in the article describes the destruction of a re-purposed building on the project called the “Chicken Shed,” which we argued was an example of what Stewart Brand calls a “low road building”–good to think in, and a great place to come together and remove structural barriers in a project. It was torn down in 2011, in a way that became very symbolic to much of the former team as the end of an era. The virtual reconstruction of the Chicken Shed shared a similar fate, after the end of Okapi Island in Second Life.
Anyway, give it a read and let me know what you think about our “archaeology of us.” If you’d like a copy with the figures, drop me a line.
Colleen Morgan 