The Workmen of Mes Aynak

The story had all of the elements of a good Sunday New York Times (or Saturday Guardian) interest piece; ancient heritage on top of a mountain in Afghanistan is threatened by Chinese mining interests, but recent excavations revealed golden treasure, so the site may be safe for a time. I am not involved in the excavations at Mes Aynak, but the narrative is familiar--threatened sites, ancient treasure, and archaeologists assuring us that the site is of utmost importance to our knowledge of the past. Yet this is not what caught my attention--it was the counter-narrative presented in the brilliant photographs of the site by photojournalist Jerome Starkey.

In his set of forty photos on Flickr, Starkey captures the mountain vistas, the treasure, the foreign archaeologists carefully excavating the important discoveries; these are familiar tropes within archaeological photography, especially within the select few photographs that accompany archaeology news stories. Yet Starkey also focused on the workmen on site, centering his lens on their experience of the site. His photographs reveal what the news stories about Mes Aynak completely exclude--the social relations between (and within) the Afghan labor force and the foreign archaeologists who employ them.

Workmen are a rarely discussed but often present element in large excavations performed outside the United States and the United Kingdom. Their presence evokes the Victorian era of archaeology; large expanses of oddly-dressed men working with picks and shovels, directed by a man in a pith helmet and perfectly clean khakis. While this is becoming rare (indeed this method is heavily critiqued) it is still employed in large excavations. Some governments require foreign excavations to employ local people, and in sites in Greece, workmen are professionals unto themselves, often more familiar with the archaeological remains than their student "supervisors." In still other excavations, workmen are not allowed to excavate the "real" archaeology, but are employed to move our already-excavated spoil or to lift sandbags. While there is a wide range of experience and interaction between foreign excavations and local people available, archaeologists receive no training in interpersonal management or customs. Yet we form relationships with these workmen and learn from each other. They become our friends and workmates but they still occupy the margins in archaeology--excluded in publications, never cited, and rarely thanked.

Starkey comes close to these workmen, as close as we do as archaeologists digging beside them, foregrounding their experience while allowing the background to fade away. You attention is not drawn to the ground, to what the man is digging, but to his face, to the conversation that is going on with the two men in the background, and to their very distinctive traditional dress. The social distance between the photographer and his subject is present, but is downplayed--Starkey does not photograph these men from the top of the trench, from the back, or as convenient human scales, but brings out the intimacy of the space occupied while doing archaeology.

Starkey also includes a photograph of the workmen being searched each day as they leave site. While there may be an on-site intimacy of shared endeavor, the workmen still remain separate and untrusted.

As an archaeologist deeply interested in photography and representation, I take Starkey's photographs as an object lesson in visual anthropology. His photographs highlight a tension in archaeological practice that goes unmentioned both in our academic literature and in popular news stories about gold and treasure.

Colleen Morgan

*Thanks to Ryan Anderson who invited this contribution and to Jerome Starkey for allowing me to link to and discuss his photography of the excavations at Mes Aynak, Afghanistan.

Archaeology, Anthropology, and Multi-sited Ethnography

A couple of weeks ago I attended a brown bag lecture given by Barbara Voss (Stanford) titled Sexual Effects: Postcolonial and Queer Perspectives on the Archaeology of Sexuality. It was an excellent overview of her research on China Camp in San Jose, California, a community that was overwhelmingly male. In her talk she discussed what the materiality of homosociality looks like as well as how we can think about gender and sexuality in the past. Barbara Voss is a prominent voice in the field of archaeology, and her work is interdisciplinary to the core. The talk was well attended, but I didn't recognize any socio-cultural anthropologists in the audience. This was a fairly typical occurrence, sadly. Even at our more formal gatherings, the Monday evening 290 lectures, the socio-cultural professors and students are completely absent at talks that feature archaeologists.

There are a number of ways one could react to this, and I think I've run the gamut at this point. Do They (the capitalization as the beginning of an anti-fraternal sentiment) think that the past (Us) is irrelevant? Do they just not understand archaeology? Do they not feel like we have anything to offer them? Or are they just bowing underneath the substantial burden of both a widening of anthropological purview and a narrowing of in-field specialization? In their introduction to the 2009 Annual Review of Anthropology, Don Brenneis and Peter Ellison succinctly address this point, stating that "The expanding universe of knowledge increases the distance between disciplines of inquiry as the techniques and theories that are developed at the advancing edges of fields become ever more remote from their common roots." The study of human experience has become so broad that the specializations necessary to make meaningful contributions to research, to carve out your own niche, leave no time for holism.

I still don't think that lets Them (or Us, for that matter) off the hook entirely. While I am certainly on the more eclectic side of archaeology, I find resources in geology, geography, science and technology studies, architecture, new media studies, information studies, material sciences--I've stuck my nose into most corners of academia and have come away inspired, refreshed, and excited to use my changed perspective to think about archaeology. Truly, I think most of what I think of as "The Big Kids," the prominent scholars in any field, do the same--they are broadly familiar with the academic terrain surrounding their interests. I walked into Lawrence Cohen's class to co-lecture on Virtual Anthropology and he was familiar with my work, and the excellent ethnographic work of Tom Boellstorff in Second Life. Being broadly conversant in your colleagues' work is only a start--if you don't think that their research is in some way relevant to your own, then you aren't being creative enough. If you don't think that the study of materiality and human lifeways in the past is relevant to understanding current populations, then I'm not sure there's much I can write to make you think differently.

Finally, for a mild, anthropological example, back to Barb Voss' talk. During the post-lecture discussion one of our professors asked if Voss had done any comparative work in the small town in China where most of the residents of China Camp were born and raised and kept families. Alas, she said, no. "Archaeologists aren't very good at multi-sited ethnographies." This comment struck me during the lecture, and later I realized that I thought she was completely wrong on this point. I refreshed my knowledge of the anthropological literature (and controversy) surrounding multi-sited ethnographies and came to the conclusion that archaeologists are the ultimate multi-sited (material) ethnographers. It's just that often times our study sites are piled on top of one another. Many of us multiply the difficulty by studying and comparing many sites of various ages. Our material, temporal perspective literally grounds your research, even if the many peoples that have lived in your study region before had vastly different lives and perspectives throughout the ages.

While holism may not be first in your mind as you conduct your research, holism will lend depth to your research, and maybe get you a half-step closer to being one of the "Big Kids." At the very least, before you do "an archaeology" of something, look us up first. You might learn something, if only the location of the good bar in town.

Colleen Morgan