Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the significance of haptics for crafting archaeological-scientific knowledge. It involves an empirical method of following encounters between various bodies around field sites, establishing archaeological fieldwork as an experimental and material craft.

Paper long abstract:

Touching bodies are performed prominently in archaeological fieldwork as metonymical points of entry for knowledge creation. This paper proposes a philosophically informed methodology following touching encounters between bodies, soil, objects, tools, and others. Drawing on my empirical fieldwork at various excavations, I will discuss archaeologists as experimenters in "mid-embodiment" (Myers & Dumit, 2011). This 'mid' entails archaeologists' bodies colliding with sites in distinct ways, speculating and hypothesizing while they move about.

Not simply one of the phenomenological senses, touch features an animating function which enables

bodies to poetically craft knowledge (Manning, 2009; Vasseleu, 2009). Touch does not singularly commit to particular sense organs, but rather to what affects bodies and what is affected by them - partaking in the reversibility of touch (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2009, p. 309). Inter-esting trenches or finds are crafted in a haptic dance with field sites, predisposed to particular material rhythms and discontinuities of work. Contemplating and reflecting body poses alternate with hands-on manual labor in a logic of archaeological artisanal craftsmanship.

I furthermore propose an intimate relation between archaeological craftsmanship and dwelling (Latimer & Munro, 2009), in which archaeologists animate partial, ambitious, and ambivalent pasts as well as futures, thereby adding to what it might mean to do field science beyond a logic of expertise.