Why do I blog about archaeology? 1

In 2013, I started blogging about archaeology. It was part of a whole website I created to share what I knew about doing cultural resource management archaeology and help folks get CRM jobs. I’d been doing archaeology for about a decade by that time; my career had seen all sorts of ups and downs. I’d gotten my first job in CRM in 2004, moved from a newly minted MA to a unionized janitor to an archaeology crew chief position in 2005. I’d been laid off, ghosted, ground down and otherwise used between 2004 and 2014; but, I’d also worked on some pretty amazing projects, met some excellent colleagues, and was well on my way to learning the ins and outs of contract archaeology. By 2014, I’d decided to go for my PhD because I wanted to become a CRM principal investigator. Eventually, I wanted to start my own company. However, I landed an excellent job as a tenure track professor at an R1 university.

Over the six years since becoming a professor, I slowed down on blogging for several reasons: 

• Publish or perish is real in academia. The time I used to spend writing blog posts went into writing technical reports, journal articles, and a book.
• Figuring out academia takes time. Universities are unique companies in the United States. They operate on a different system than CRM. It has taken me a few years to figure out how this place works.
• Being in the public eye is not safe for professors. Blogging puts my thoughts out there for the world to see. Not everyone likes what I have to say. Each word in the public domain opens me up to attack from folks who don’t like academia, me, or my thoughts.
• Blogging could have threatened my tenure case. Sometimes, it be your own people. I had to watch out for folks scrutinizing me from the outside but those with the real power to take my career were the folks at my own institution, in my own department. I came to realize many of my colleagues do not share my sentiments about how archaeology should be. They had the power to reject my tenure case because getting tenure is not an objective process and it’s not guaranteed. 

I was particularly vulnerable as the only Black archaeology assistant professor in my department, which is largely white people. They never made me feel like my race would matter in my tenure case but that feeling never goes away for Black people. That’s one way colonialism embeds itself in the minds of BIPOC people. It takes a lot of effort to dislodge those thoughts. One poorly received blog post that sparked the ire of a voting bloc of my colleagues could have been enough to send me packing.

• Social media exposure was harming my mental health. I used social media platforms to drive traffic to my blog, which helped bring my message to a wider audience. Unfortunately, this also exposed me to a greater number of negative comments, criticisms, and outright threats. Readers may not know this, but I don’t always publish all the comments I get on this blog. I also don’t respond to all the direct messages I get on social media because some of them are racist, threatening, and otherwise violent. I used to just brush these off because they were dwarfed by the overall positive comments. 

These sorts of comments were not always coming from white archaeologists. There are BIPOC archaeologists and archaeologish people out there who don’t like what I’m saying online. These negative comments added up over time and make me feel depressed, anxious, and angry about what I was doing.

I feel like this all came to a head in the backlash against CRM Archaeology Podcast Episode 249. It was ill received, and I apologized for my involvement in that episode. Still, the response on social media made me feel sad. I was trying to help archaeologists but had let them down. Even thought I’d written hundreds of blog posts, thousands of social media posts, and recorded hundreds of hours of podcast episodes that had generally been well received, a single mishap brought some of my colleagues down on me. Rightfully, they put me in my place, but they also made me question whether I should keep blogging about archaeology anymore.

I don’t need to blog.

Despite all the calls for archaeologists, especially professors, to engage with the public, blogging doesn’t really help our careers. At best, it’s considered a form of public service. At worst, it’s a liability for any university, anthropology department, or CRM company. My statements on this blog stand as my own personal position but, because I work at an R1 school, there is no separation between what I do in my personal life, what I do off campus, and what happens here at work. It’s like being a politician or being out in the field in CRM. Whether you’re digging or not, you’re always at work. 

The things I say and do outside the workplace can and will follow me into the workplace, especially if they’re negative. There’s only a small chance of them coming to work if I do something good but there will definitely be some sort of response if I do something bad. For example, I was a good Little League coach but that had no effect on my job. But I could have lost my job if I’d gone wild at a heckling parent during a Little League game (even if they deserved it). Writing a well-received blog post is a slightly positive form of service for my department. Writing an ill-received one is a net negative and I could lose my job if I write something everybody really hates. This can happen despite my having been recently granted tenure.

This is life amongst the #wokepolice, #metoo, and #blacklivesmatter. The rewards for blogging about archaeology do not exceed the potential downsides.

However, I still have stuff I want to say and there are people out there who are willing to hear it. This blog gets it out faster than journal articles and we can actually talk about the content of these posts on this platform.

I want to blog.

After CRM Archaeology Podcast Episode 249, I had to rethink everything. It had been building for years but that was the final straw. Should I keep blogging? Do I really need all the negative vibes that come from engaging with social media? Does what I say really matter? Am I making a positive difference?

I took a hiatus from blogging, but this break had some unintended consequences:

It greatly slowed my writing productivity. It’s hard to write when you’re out of practice. This is not good when you’re supposed to write for a living.

I realized I don’t need social media. Nobody needs social media because it’s extremely rare for anything of substance to be peddled on social media platforms. What has the potential to bring people together has been co-opted by corporations and turned into a machine of irrelevant gossip. Why not spare your mental health and stay out of the church choir?

I had fewer outlets to express my opinion. While I knew I didn’t want to get dragged into the social media quagmire, I felt like I had fewer places where I could express my opinions without blogging. I also had fewer spaces where I could interact with other archaeologists, which has been an important influence on my career.

I kept meeting people who knew me from my blog. The blog has been around for a decade. There are hundreds of blog posts, some of which are used in university classrooms. I kept meeting other archaeologists who were asking me if I was done blogging. I used to tell them I was taking a break. Looks like I’m back.

I still want to make positive change. While nobody gets famous blogging about archaeology, I still feel like archaeoblogging has the potential to contribute to positive change. There have been some fruitful conversations I’ve had with other archaeologists based on some of my blog posts either through messaging platforms or in person. It looks like some of the things I talk about are on the minds of others.

I realized that while I don’t need to blog, I really want to blog. It’s a good way for me to get ideas out of my mind and into social spaces. In the past, archaeologists were very reliant upon conferences and other occasional gatherings to share ideas, but I’ve learned that blogging and podcasting is another way we can connect, converse, and share ideas.

I also understand that I’m privileged to be able to blog. Some of us can’t talk about what we’re doing at work because of our employer’s privacy concerns. As a soon-to-be-tenured faculty member, I not only have the time (not a lot of time but a few minutes each morning) but also free speech protections that allows me to share my ideas in a way that junior faculty, grad students, and CRMers don’t always have. My tenure vote was positive. I’m on the way to becoming an associate professor in the next couple weeks (fingers crossed). So I now have the ability to speak more freely about what I’m thinking, my story on the tenure track (Lord, do I have things to say about that), but more importantly I can speak my mind on the conditions in American archaeology over the past 20 years.

I was never really saying anything too controversial on this blog but there were emotional things that folks didn’t like. Sometimes the truth hurts, which is why we don’t always speak it aloud. And, sometimes, truth is relative, which is why it invites discussion. This is another reason why I should continue blogging. So we can talk about the things folks don’t want to discuss and speak from our own experiences and positions so others can get a wider understanding of American archeology as it is today.

Moving forward

Since getting hired at my university, I’ve given 45 guest lectures, public talks, keynotes, or forums. Twenty-one of these talks were given during the pandemic. Most of them focused on increasing diversity in archaeology, antiracism, and BIPOC archaeology. Through all of that, I’ve seen some  movement among archaeology organizations towards becoming inclusive, antiracist organizations but there is still far to go.

I’m not sure folks fully understand that becoming an antiracist is not about reparations, or white guilt, or BIPOC revenge. It means moving into a space where we can start having sincere, adult conversations about race that can lead towards reconciliation in our country. The United States has never truly faced up to the genocide, racism, misogyny, and classism that was here at its conception. We are the children of this heritage. One of the first steps in human growth is recognizing that we have problems. A close second step is facing those problems, as functional, rational, sentient adults with human agency, so we can start planning how to address it. Then, we need execute those plans. 

We are past the point of sustainability. We currently live in a system that is unsustainable, so sustaining this current pathway is folly. We need to move into a society that is regenerative. Not just environmentally regenerative but also socially, culturally, physically, and mentally. In addition to using fewer resources, working fewer hours but with more concentration, and sharing the labor, money, and energy; we also need to reconcile who we are as a people with the histories we are told. This means staring down our history with full attention, mindfulness, and compassion, then letting the emotions that come with this stare down arise and fall away. This is hard to do at first. I know personally. It gets a little bit easier with practice. The goal is to learn how to live in equanimity with the world in which we currently live so we can be strong enough to let the things that no longer serve us fall away like autumn leaves. This will open space for something new to grow— true regeneration. 

Archaeology is only now starting to recognize that being a monoracial field in a rapidly diversifying country is not a good thing. Archaeology is only now acknowledging that harassment, sexism, and capitalism haven’t made our craft a good place to work. It’s only been the past few years that archaeologists have started talking about the mental health issues that arise when working in exploitative conditions like CRM and academia. But we haven’t really started facing the problem, which is us. Archaeologists are the problem with archaeology. Archaeologists are also the solution.

Addressing something like racism in American society requires us to look inside our own selves and get to know who we are. As the pandemic demonstrated, many Americans didn’t like what they saw when they looked within. Mental health complications, domestic violence rates, drug usage, overspending all increased once we had to sit at home, alone with ourselves during the pandemic. We started to learn that being alone, calm, and steady as Americans was not a regenerative thing. Part of that has to do with the way we’ve been socialized, so you can probably see what will happen in we start sitting with the racism we’ve all been socialized to perpetuate.

Moving forward, I would like to start focusing on some other aspects of archaeology that I feel will help others working in the field. I would like to shift away from the emphasis on how to get a job in CRM and how to serve the CRM industry towards a discussion of how we can change the way we think so we can keep working in this industry. Hopefully, changing our minds will transform the industry.

The main reason why I don’t go back to CRM from academia is because when I was in CRM I got tired of having to find a new job every 3 years. The instability of CRM is what keeps me in academia. However, the constant petty politicking and recalcitrant relationships between colleagues in anthropology departments is horrible. Being a junior faculty member of color is not a comfortable place, even if you work for a “minority serving” institution like I do. Higher ed was not created for non-white elites nor was it created as a vehicle for social equity. Universities breed inequality. That has always been their core mission and that’s what they continue to do. I hate how most anthropology departments straight up refuse to prepare students for any worthwhile future in archaeology and how universities are degenerating every major into a high-priced, milquetoast MOOC. The only thing that matters in academia is how much money they can wring out of students, donors, and grant funding organizations. The State has basically given up on higher education or has actively sought out to destroy it. This is no environment to train tomorrow’s archaeologists.

If this is the state of archaeology, why do I keep doing it? How do I continue navigating this path? Is there anything good that can come of it?

The Inherent Good in Archaeology

A simple definition of archaeology goes something like: Archaeology is the analysis of human pasts using material culture, ecofacts, and features. An implied motivation for archaeology is: Archaeology includes learning about the past so we can make better decisions in the present so we can build a better future. To me, these sound like good things.

Our motivations, methods, and results have not always lived up to these goals, but I feel like it’s good that we know more about human pasts through archaeology than we ever have before. I feel like our next steps should be to use this knowledge to make life more livable today. This is why I’m still compelled to do archaeology and I believe this transformation should start with archaeologists themselves.

Archaeologists are no better or worse than other human beings. However, our careers force us to know more about some aspect of human pasts than other people in our society. This gives us something special we can contribute but this gift needs to come from within each of us. Each of us can give something different based on our knowledge, our position, and our desire to do better for ourselves and other human beings. Cultivating this gift will require us to tap into the deeper motivations that each of us has for doing archaeology. An altruistic state isn’t necessary but it will help you stay motivated to give to others when you feel like retreating.

For the past 20 years I’ve focused on African Diaspora archaeology. I started in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic before moving to the American West. One of my current projects is on the island of St. Croix in the United States Virgin Islands (USVI). I was fortunate enough to work on all sorts of other sites but the ones attributed to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) are the ones I gravitated towards. Studying African American history and archaeological sites is emotionally heavy. Something happens when you spend dozens of hours a week digging up the material culture left behind by dispossessed, enslaved, and otherwise subjugated people. Doing this for decades leaves its toll on your psyche and heart. 

I always wondered why I was drawn to this aspect of American history. Was it to learn more about my ancestors? To write the histories of those overlooked by historians? Or was it something I wanted to do for myself and my children? Truthfully, it was for all of those reasons and a few more. In recent years, I’ve found myself using this knowledge to cultivate a better understanding of white people which has been invaluable because the main people fighting against Black History (aka “Wokeness” or “CRT” [whatever they mean by those terms]) are European Americans. 

Unearthing the historical traumas of Black Americans helped me better understand my own country and its culture. I didn’t want to know things were this unfair. I didn’t want to learn that BIPOC people were killed with impunity just because of our skin color. That the economic and political structures of my country were set up to prevent my full participation. And, that these things have been echoing through my country since its conception. This knowledge has made me think twice about our national ethos. It’s made me skeptical. It’s also made me empathetic to the plight of other Americans, including poor white people. All this research made me understand that our country’s greatness has been hampered by struggles for power and money; all of us have been adversely affected.

My research has been welcomed by other BIPOC who have also struggled in this system. White accomplices have also welcomed this information. But it is like a radioactive poison to a large percentage of whites including some of my own family members and friends. A certain demographic of Americans does not want to hear this knowledge. I don’t really know why but I feel like it’s similar to when someone tells you that Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny aren’t real. That pulling yourself up by the bootstraps was supposed to be a cruel joke. That Americans are not particularly exceptional; that we’re exceptional human beings like everyone else. Most importantly, that it was people in our own family that did all the past atrocities. 

It’s hard for Black people to reconcile that it was other Africans that sold us into slavery. I’m not Native American but I can see how it would be sad and shocking to learn the extent to which other Native Americans allied with Europeans against other Native tribes. It makes me sad to know that Native Americans also owned African slaves, even bringing them to Oklahoma via the Trail of Tears and, initially, refusing to enroll them as tribal members once the Civil War was over. It can’t be pleasant to learn that Chinese and Japanese labor contractors were the ones who made the arrangements to provide cheap laborers to railroads, sugar plantations, lumber mills, and other industries in the United States only for these companies to shortchange these laborers, force them to do dangerous work, and failed to protect them from racist violence. There are hundreds of other stories of oppression and discrimination for Basque, German, Italian, Spanish, Mexican, and any other ethnicity in U.S. history. Atrocities against women are pervasive, ongoing, and came at the hands of men of all races and ethnicities. Poor white people continue to suffer at the hands of multinational corporations and avaricious politicians. None of these realities are easy to hear. Holding this knowledge should not fuel “whataboutism” (e.g., passing the blame onto others or absolving any of us from these pasts), but it should help us recognize that this system we are all perpetuating was built on harm and continues to harm us all. Some of us have been harmed much more than others but all of us have been harmed in some way.

Knowledge like this also burrows deep into our psyche. It makes us question what we thought was true. It reveals how deep and encompassing the damage has been. Knowledge like this is emotional. When your heart stops hurting, you need to realize that you might now have a different understanding of the “other” people living alongside us. Understanding what this country has done to us helps us realize that the messages they’re sending us were never intended to make our lives better. It was all designed to keep elites in power. This knowledge cultivates empathy but also clarifies who the true enemy is.

The only people who don’t want to acknowledge injustices revealed by archaeology are those who feel like they benefit from inequality. They don’t want to be empathetic because they think this is a weakness. The pain of engaging with these painful pasts is too much for them. They have no tolerance for the reality that cooperation, collaboration, and caring is the only way forward for the human race. They think things like political power, money, and prestige are scarce; that there is not enough of this to go around. The reality is we create those things out of thin air. The resources of this world are scarce, but the resourcefulness of people is not. The only way forward is together. We are all we’ve got. Injustice holds all of us back. It limits our beliefs and justifies violence against other people, plants, animals, and this entire world.

I feel like archaeology has the potential to make archaeologists better citizens. I think we can and should use our knowledge to change our own lives and those of our friends and families. We know what has worked for human beings and what has not. We know greedy, unscrupulous, low-balling business practices can drive whole industries to the bottom (I’m looking at you CRM). That employees of these companies are destined to get abused, burned out, and drop out. We also know that trifling, childish, small-minded, petty politicking destroys group cohesion and makes academic departments ineffective (This one is aimed at academia). In a society that is losing faith in higher education, the last thing we need is pompous, disconnected archaeology faculty perpetuating the same juvenile power struggles that have prevented universities from adequately serving archaeology students for the past 160 years.

Change is happening. We can’t do anything about it. Either we use the knowledge we’ve collected from the archaeological record to make our lives better. Or we maintain the status quo until state governments eliminate historic preservation regulations, which would make anthropology departments and the whole CRM industry disappear. The choice is up to archaeologists. 

Are you looking forward to an archaeology conference? If so, which one? Where is it at and when will it be? Tell us all in the comments box below or send me an email.

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