Thread by @GingeryGamer

The group of archaeologists who are excavating the Roman site everyone is gushing about is the same group who excavated the amazing chariot burial- the one with the horses. But you wouldn’t know that, because non-academic field archaeologists get no public credit for their work.

As a discipline, we need to have a serious conversation about the ethics of how academic archaeology benefits from the unacknowledged labor of commercial field archaeologists.

Many commercial field archaeologists have years of experience in excavating and understanding beyond their academic counterparts, but they see their work denigrated by the public, co-opted by the academy, and ignored in the press.

I’ve been on both sides of it, and I understand the NDA process when working with developers. But we need to ask ourselves why it’s okay for the big orgs to have their quotes in press about sites, when the actual excavators are never even mentioned.

We produce so many archaeology postgrads, but when they choose to go out into the commercial sector, we ignore them. If this site was being excavated by a big org, a university, or as part of a PhD, you can bet the archaeologists would be celebrated.

My big angry take? This is coloniality repackaged for modern capitalist conceptions of archaeology. Commercial archaeologists are the modern equivalent of the many people in the background of early site photographs without whom there would be no data or archaeological discipline.

Full disclosure, because #ethics, I’m married to one of the field archaeologists involved in the sites in question. I don’t consider advocating for overall better recognition of field archaeologist labor to be a conflict of interest. I consider it an ethical imperative.

Courtesy @MartynKing5.