Paper short abstract:

Understanding how archaeological fieldwork enjoins a collection of people in the production of common interpretive artefacts shows us how anthropological fieldwork can become more collaborative without sacrificing a reflexive and integrated understanding of the social relations of others.

Paper long abstract:

By contrast to anthropology, where the image of the lone fieldworker continues to exert a powerful influence, archaeological fieldwork enjoins a collection of people in the production of a common interpretive artefact - 'the site'. This paper explores the different forms that archaeological and anthropological relations take in the context of fieldwork, and looks at the different ways in which these are used in the enactment of a distinction between subject and object. Within anthropology recent critiques of conventional Malinowskian fieldwork have opened out the subjectivity of the anthropologist to his or her subjects of enquiry, but rarely to other anthropologists. In archaeological fieldwork, by contrast, a variety of people with different forms of knowledge, specialism and experience negotiate collectively agreed upon forms of 'data'. Excavations are therefore collaborative in ways that are rare in ethnographic fieldwork. This paper argues that whilst archaeological fieldwork does not provide any neat 'model' from which anthropologists can borrow, an understanding of the role of social relations in the mediation of multiple subjectivities does suggest how anthropological fieldwork might become more collaborative without sacrificing a commitment to a reflexive and integrated understanding of the social relations of others.