On the Archaeology Digging Circuit

Archaeologists hear it all the time: " I always wanted to be an archaeologist, but..." As for me, I stumbled into archaeology by pure luck. It had nothing to do with fantasies about Egyptian tombs or Stonehenge.

I was 15 or 16 and trapped in my grammar school library on a rainy lunch hour. Seemingly at random, I picked up a book of things to do during your summer holidays and came across a note about the Calendar of Excavations. Issued by the Council for British Archaeology, this publication was said to list archaeological excavations that needed help. Expecting nothing, I wrote off and received a thin booklet containing the details of a few dozen projects throughout England, Wales, and Scotland. This was my opening to a whole new world.

My first excavation was in 1969 at Mucking, just a few miles from where we lived. All I remember about the site's archaeology is that it involved me wheelbarrowing a lot of gravel from one place to another while other people excavated semi-subterrean features we called "grubs" -- grubenhauser. But who cared about that? There were too many really important things going on. I'm talking about the social life. That centered around after work socializing and trips to the pub. Drinking age at the time was 16; at least, I was 16 and I drank. The crew was international and the weather not so good. Several of us lived in an ex-army tent and we ate communal meals in a hut on the site. It was heaven.

I didn't realize it, but I was participating in the digging circuit, a phenomenon that would set me on track for a lifetime of archaeology.

Who were the circuit diggers, you ask?

From sometime in the 1960s until sometime in the late 1970s, a constantly changing group of a few hundred people moved from one excavation to the next. These were circuit diggers. Every social class, region, level of education, and gender was represented. Some were career archaeologists looking for a real job but many, like me, just enjoyed the mobile, unconventional lifestyle. Pay was poor. Excavators, called "volunteers," got 10 pounds 50 pence cash each week. The per diem payment declined after 30 days, at which time many of us moved on the next site. During my three plus years on the circuit I don't remember paying taxes or National Insurance.

If the pay was bad, the living conditions were worse. Tents in the winter were just the begining. Derelict buildings were commonly taken over by the organizers to serve as the dig house. No heat. No hot water. Damp bedding. Chemical toilet in what had been the pantry. One cottage had to be reglazed with fragments of glass that we collected from the floor. Surprisingly, there were not as many complaints as you'd expect. It was rough, but that didn't seem to be a major talking point. Working and living with the same people under these conditions created a camaraderie that I have not known since. Other old archaeologists would agree that working on the circuit was a pivotal experience, never to be forgotten.

Aside from the social aspects, there was the technical experience gained by doing archaeology day in, day out. In those years I served the equivalent of an apprenticeship on a great range of complex sites, learning from the most skilled excavators. To me, field archaeology was (and is) a craft that's best learned by doing. Circuit diggers would roll their eyes at the efforts of undergraduates who would muddle through the six weeks of fieldwork required to get a BA in Archaeology. Even those with advanced degrees were often found to be more of a menace than an asset. I learned from my friend and sometime supervisor Dilwyn Jones to test a newbie's skill by setting them to excavate a construction trench. Useful advice when I got my first job as a Site Assistant.

Since I'm in reminiscence mode, here are a couple (three actually) odd events that occured during this period:

My first job as a full time worker on the circuit was in the spring of 1972, when I began working for Henrietta Quinnell (or "Henya" Miles as she was known at the time) at Flint Castle. For some reason the local teenagers took a dislike to the archaeology crew... perhaps we took over their pub. Things came to a head when, late one afternoon, we learned that a group of locals was going to come to the site and "sort us out". There may have been a dozen of us diggers, men and women, mostly in our late teens and early 20s, and some of us took up pick handles. I don't recall how many locals turned up but I do remember that they were rather put off by our war-like posture and held back long enough for the police to arrive. The Siege of Flint Castle was over before it began.

The spring of 1973 found me supervising a backhoe that was trenching the planned site of the Westgate Centre, in Oxford, where a medieval priory was rumoured to have existed. Not much was turning up when my boss, Tom Hassall, pointed to an old man who was peering through the wire fence at our excavations. He wore a light raincoat and had a pipe sticking out of his mouth. "Know who that is?" asked Tom. "It's that bloke Tolkien." I'd been carrying a paperback Lord of the Rings around for the last year, so I was impressed. Sadly, "that bloke" died later that year. I should have invited him in to look, but I didn't.

In a totally unrelated event about a year later, I was digging a trench (archaeological, not sewer) in Shrewsbury for Martin Carver when a woman walked past dragging a small boy. Glancing over to me she snapped "Look at that. If you don't work harder at school you'll end up like him!"

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Three plus years on the circuit turned me into a skilled field technician but I wasn't yet an archaeologist. If you had asked me why archaeology was worth doing I would have been flummoxed. That had to wait until two years into graduate school at UC Berkeley.

My Kind of Archaeology

Writing in 1925, anthropologist Alfred Kroeber commented that the Native peoples of the San Francisco Bay Area were “extinct so far as all practical purposes are concerned.” No doubt, this would have come as a surprise to the people he was talking about who were in fact very much alive. And yet Kroeber knew this very well. So what did he mean?

The key is in his phrase “practical purposes.” As far as Kroeber was concerned the only worthwhile “practical purpose” was to document pre-contact Native American culture. This, he believed was the Real Thing, the authentic, pristine culture, unsullied by contact with Euro-Americans.

Today we call his attitude essentialism.

Kroeber was neither a fool nor a monster, but like every last one of us he was affected by the zeitgeist of his era. Kroeber’s fallacy was to assume that because a group no longer lives the way their ancestors did they have lost the "essence" of what makes up cultural identity. In fact, culture’s not a static thing. Never was. People adapt to new situations now as in the past, modifying old practices and developing new ones.

This is as true of many immigrants to the American West as the area’s Indigenous peoples. But although all had to grapple with change, some groups—Indians, Jews, Blacks, and Chinese, among others—had a harder time of it. They had to develop work-arounds to thrive, even survive, in a society that saw them as outsiders, as Other.

In Kroeber's view, the loss of "essential" aspects of traditional culture meant cultural extinction. In contrast, I choose to see these changes as expressions of resilience—the day-to-day cultural work that all despised ethnic minorities must do just to get along.

This realization came to me as I was exposed to the life histories of people whose archaeological sites I excavated. For as I reconstructed their lives through archives and archaeology, they emerged as people who were not entirely dominated by the often brutal historical conditions in which they found themselves. They were not puppets whose strings were pulled by huge social forces entirely outside of their control. The more I studied the intimate details of their lives, I realized that they had agency and used it.

This simple idea came to dominate the way I interpret archaeological remains.

Clink on the links below for articles about

African-Americans

Chinese/Chinese-Americans

Jews

This academia.edu page links to more of my publications.

Books

From this author's perspective, the best archaeology publisher you'll ever encounter is Mitch Allen, founder of AltaMira Press and Left Coast Press and current co-proprietor of Scholarly Roadside Service. That may have something to do with his archaeology PhD from UCLA, but Mitch's understanding of the field is only part of the equation. While keenly aware that a publisher has to make a profit to stay in business, he took chances on books (like mine) that might or might not ever make back his cost. Mitch is no softie but his instincts are good. Most importantly, he cares about his authors and making their books a success. Unlike the usual big name presses whose marketing consists of updating their catalog and website, Mitch marketed my books directly to likely buyers. What a man!