Dig Houses, Dwelling, and Knowledge Production in Archaeology
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jca.v2i1.22331Keywords:
dig house, expedition house, history of archaeology, contemporary archaeology, dwelling, ÇatalhöyükAbstract
Dig houses are where archaeologists dwell during excavations. These accommodations vary as broadly as their accompanying archaeological sites and are integral to the experience of archaeological investigation. Even as interest in embodied approaches to archaeology become popular, dig houses remain invisible in academic literature. In this article we examine the impact of the lived environment on archaeological research. To provide context to this study, we briefly discuss the history of dig houses in archaeological practice, then describe modern accommodations used during excavations. Building on this background, we then review phenomenological and architectural approaches to understanding the impact of the built environment on academic research. This understanding will then be used for a specific case study—the life-history of a small building called the “Chicken Shed” at Çatalhöyük. Finally, we discuss the conclusions of our research: how dig houses impact the construction of the past and how to situate them as places to think, collaborate, and critique archaeological practice.
References
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____., C. Newland, J. Schofield, A. Nilsson, S. Davis and A. Myers. 2009. “Transit, Transition: Excavating J641 VUJ.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 19(1): 1–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0959774309000018
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Bibby, G. 1970. Looking for Dilmun. New York: Knopf.
Bosanquet, R. C. 1938. Letters and Light Verse. Gloucester: John Bellows.
Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511812507
Boyd Hawes, H. 1965. “Memoirs of a Pioneer Excavator in Crete.” Archaeology 18(2): 94–101.
____., B. E. Wheeler Williams, R. B. Seager and E. Hall Dohan. 1908. Gournia, Vasiliki and Other Prehistoric Sites on the Isthmus of Hierapetra, Crete; Excavations of the Wells-Houston-Cramp Expeditions, 1901, 1903, 1904. Philadelphia, PA: The American Exploration Society, Free Museum of Science and art.
Brand, S. 1994. How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built. New York, NY: Viking.
Breasted, J. H. 1933. The Oriental Institute. University of Chicago Survey XII. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Brown, A. 1994. Arthur Evans and the Palace of Minos. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum.
Cadogan, G. 2000. “The Pioneers: 1900–1914.” In Cretan Quests: British Explorers, Excavators and Historians, edited by D. Huxley, 15–27. London: British School at Athens.
Dovey, K. 2005. “The Silent Complicity of Architecture.” In Habitus: A Sense of Place, edited by J. Hillier and E. Rooksby, 267–280. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.
Drower, M. S. 1995. Flinders Petrie: A Life in Archaeology. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
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Fagan, B. M. 2007. Return to Babylon: Travelers, Archaeologists, and Monuments in Mesopotamia. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado.
Frankfort, H., T. Jacobsen and C. Preusser. 1932. Tell Asmar and Khafaje: The First Season’s Work in Eshnunna, 1930/31. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Giddens, A. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Goode, J. F. 2007. Negotiating for the Past: Archaeology, Nationalism, and Diplomacy in the Middle East, 1919–1941. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Goffman, E. 1958. “Characteristics of Total Institutions.” In Symposium on Preventive and Social Psychiatry 15–17 April 1957, 43– 84. Washington, DC: Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.
____. 1961. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.
Gould, R. A. and M. B. Schiffer. 1981. Modern Material Culture: The Archaeology of Us. New York: Academic Press.
Hall, E. T. 1966. The Hidden Dimension. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Hamilakis, Y. 2002. Labyrinth Revisited: Rethinking “Minoan” Archaeology. Oxford: Oxbow.
____. 2007. The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
____. and A. Anagnostopoulos. 2009. Archaeological Ethnographies. Leeds, UK: Maney Publishing.
Hamilton, C. 2000. “Faultlines: The Construction of Archaeological Knowledge at Çatalhöyük.” In Towards Reflexive Method in Archaeology: The Example at Çatalhöyük, edited by I. Hodder, 119–127. Cambridge: McDonald Institute Monograph.
Hitchcock, L. and P. Koudounaris. 2002. “Virtual Discourse: Arthur Evans and the Reconstructions of the Minoan Palace at Knossos.” In Labyrinth Revisited: Rethinking “Minoan” Archaeology, edited by Y. Hamilakis, 40–58. Oxford: Oxbow.
Heidegger, M. 2001 [1951]. “Building Dwelling Thinking.” In Poetry, Language, Thought, by M. Heidegger and translated by A. Hofstadter, 141–159. New York: Perennial Classics.
Hodder, I. 1982. “Theoretical Archaeology: A Reactionary View.” In Symbolic and Structural Archaeology, edited by I. Hodder. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511558252.002
____. and C. Cessford. 2004. “Daily Practice and Social Memory at Catalhoyuk.” American Antiquity 69(1): 17–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/4128346
____. and P. Pels. 2010. “History Houses: A New Interpretation of Architectural Elaboration at Çatalhöyük.” In Religion in the Emergence of Civilization: Çatalhöyük as a Case Study, edited by I. Hodder, 163–186. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511761416.007
Holtorf, C. 2006. “Studying Archaeological Fieldwork in the Field: Views from Monte Polizzo.” In Ethnographies of Archaeological Practice, edited by M. Edgeworth, 81–94. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press.
Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203466025
Jacobsen, T. 1992. “Crusading to the Past.” The Oriental Institute News and Notes 133: 1–8, 12–14.
Lloyd, S. 1980. Foundations in the Dust: The Story of Mesopotamian Exploration (revised edition). New York: Thames and Hudson.
Lucas, G. 2001. Critical Approaches to Fieldwork: Contemporary and Historical Archaeological Practice. London: Routledge.
Macgillivray, J. A. 2001. Minotaur: Sir Arthur Evans and the Archaeology of the Minoan Myth. London: Pimlico.
Mallowan, M. E. L. 1977. Mallowan’s Memoirs. New York: Dodd, Mead.
McGuire, R. H. 2008. Archaeology as Political Action. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Morgan, C. 2009. “(Re)Building Çatalhöyük: Changing Virtual Reality in Archaeology.” Archaeologies 5 (3): 468–487. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11759-009-9113-0
____. 2012. Emancipatory Digital Archaeology. PhD diss., University of California.
Panofsky, E. 1972. Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism: An Inquiry into the Analogy of the Arts, Philosophy, and Religion in the Middle Ages. New York: World Publishing.
Powell, D. 1973. The Villa Ariadne. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Schofield, J. 2011. Great Excavations: Shaping the Archaeological Profession. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
Shankland, D. 1996. “C?atalho?yu?k: The Anthropology of an Archaeological Presence.” In On the Surface: C?atalho?yu?k 1993–95, edited by I. Hodder, 349–358. Cambridge: McDonald Institute Monograph.
Shanks, M. and R. H. McGuire. 1996. “The Craft of Archaeology.” American Antiquity 61(1): 75–88.
Silberman, N. A. 1982. Digging for God and Country: Exploration in the Holy Land, 1799–1917. New York: Doubleday.
Silverstein, P. 2004. “Of Rooting and Uprooting: Kabyle Habitus, Domesticity and Structural Nostalgia.” Ethnography, 5(4): 553–578. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1466138104048828
Sparks, R. T. 2013. “Publicising Petrie: Financing Fieldwork in British Mandate Palestine (1926–1938).” Present Pasts 5(1): 1–15. Available online: http://www.presentpasts.info/article/view/pp.56/108
Stevenson, A. 2012. “‘We Seem to be Working in the Same Line’: A.H.L.F. Pitt-Rivers and W.M.F. Petrie.” Bulletin of the History of Archaeology 22(1): 4–13
Thomas, J. 1993. “The Hermeneutics of Megalithic Space.” In Interpretative Archaeology, edited by C. Tilley, 73–98. Oxford: Berg.
____. 1996. Time, Culture and Identity: An Interpretive Archaeology. London: Routledge.
Tilley, C. 1994. A Phenomenology of Landscapes. Explorations in Anthropology. Oxford: Berg Publishers.
Trigger, B. G. 2006. A History of Archaeological Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tringham, R. 1994. “Engendered Places in Prehistory.” Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 1(2): 169–203. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09663699408721209
____. 2012. “Sensing the Place of Çatalhöyük: The Rhythms of Daily Life.” In Last House on the Hill: BACH Area Reports from C?atalho?yu?k, Turkey, edited by R. Tringham and M. Stevanovic´, 531–552. Los Angeles, CA: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press.
Wylie, A. 2006. “Moderate Relativism, Political Objectivism.” In The Archaeology of Bruce Trigger: Theoretical Empiricism, edited by R. F. Williamson and M. S. Bisson, 25–35. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press.
Yarrow, T. 2006. “Sites of Knowledge: Different Ways of Knowing an Archaeological Excavation.” In Ethnographies of Archaeological Practice, edited by M. Edgeworth, 20–32. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press.
Abu El-Haj, N. 2001. Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-fashioning in Israeli Society. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Allsebrook, M. 1992. Born to Rebel: The Life of Harriet Boyd Hawes. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
Ashmore, W. 2002. “‘Decisions and Dispositions’: Socializing Spatial Archaeology.” American Anthropologist 104(4): 1172–1183. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/aa.2002.104.4.1172
Bailey, D. 1990. “The Living House: Signifying Continuity.” In The Social Archaeology of Houses, edited by R. Samson, 19–48. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
____., C. Newland, J. Schofield, A. Nilsson, S. Davis and A. Myers. 2009. “Transit, Transition: Excavating J641 VUJ.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 19(1): 1–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0959774309000018
Bennett, T., B. Dibley and R. Harrison. 2014. “Introduction: Anthropology, Collecting and Colonial Governmentalities.” History and Anthropology 25 (2): 137–149. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2014.882838
Bibby, G. 1970. Looking for Dilmun. New York: Knopf.
Bosanquet, R. C. 1938. Letters and Light Verse. Gloucester: John Bellows.
Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511812507
Boyd Hawes, H. 1965. “Memoirs of a Pioneer Excavator in Crete.” Archaeology 18(2): 94–101.
____., B. E. Wheeler Williams, R. B. Seager and E. Hall Dohan. 1908. Gournia, Vasiliki and Other Prehistoric Sites on the Isthmus of Hierapetra, Crete; Excavations of the Wells-Houston-Cramp Expeditions, 1901, 1903, 1904. Philadelphia, PA: The American Exploration Society, Free Museum of Science and art.
Brand, S. 1994. How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built. New York, NY: Viking.
Breasted, J. H. 1933. The Oriental Institute. University of Chicago Survey XII. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Brown, A. 1994. Arthur Evans and the Palace of Minos. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum.
Cadogan, G. 2000. “The Pioneers: 1900–1914.” In Cretan Quests: British Explorers, Excavators and Historians, edited by D. Huxley, 15–27. London: British School at Athens.
Dovey, K. 2005. “The Silent Complicity of Architecture.” In Habitus: A Sense of Place, edited by J. Hillier and E. Rooksby, 267–280. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.
Drower, M. S. 1995. Flinders Petrie: A Life in Archaeology. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Dural, S. 2006. Protecting Çatalhöyük: Memoir of an Archaeological Site Guard. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Eddisford, D. and C. Morgan. 2011. “An Archaeology of the Contemporary: A Standing Buildings Survey of ‘The Chicken Shed’ at C?atalho?yu?k.” In C?atalho?yu?k 2011 Archive Report, edited by S. Farid, 138–149. Available online: http://www.catalhoyuk.com/downloads/Archive_Report_2011.pdf
Edgeworth, M. 2006. Ethnographies of Archaeological Practice: Cultural Encounters, Material Transformations. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press.
English Heritage. 2006. Understanding Historic Buildings: A Guide to Good Recording Practice. Available online: http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/publications/understanding-historic-buildings
Fagan, B. M. 2007. Return to Babylon: Travelers, Archaeologists, and Monuments in Mesopotamia. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado.
Frankfort, H., T. Jacobsen and C. Preusser. 1932. Tell Asmar and Khafaje: The First Season’s Work in Eshnunna, 1930/31. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Giddens, A. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Goode, J. F. 2007. Negotiating for the Past: Archaeology, Nationalism, and Diplomacy in the Middle East, 1919–1941. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Goffman, E. 1958. “Characteristics of Total Institutions.” In Symposium on Preventive and Social Psychiatry 15–17 April 1957, 43– 84. Washington, DC: Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.
____. 1961. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.
Gould, R. A. and M. B. Schiffer. 1981. Modern Material Culture: The Archaeology of Us. New York: Academic Press.
Hall, E. T. 1966. The Hidden Dimension. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Hamilakis, Y. 2002. Labyrinth Revisited: Rethinking “Minoan” Archaeology. Oxford: Oxbow.
____. 2007. The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
____. and A. Anagnostopoulos. 2009. Archaeological Ethnographies. Leeds, UK: Maney Publishing.
Hamilton, C. 2000. “Faultlines: The Construction of Archaeological Knowledge at Çatalhöyük.” In Towards Reflexive Method in Archaeology: The Example at Çatalhöyük, edited by I. Hodder, 119–127. Cambridge: McDonald Institute Monograph.
Hitchcock, L. and P. Koudounaris. 2002. “Virtual Discourse: Arthur Evans and the Reconstructions of the Minoan Palace at Knossos.” In Labyrinth Revisited: Rethinking “Minoan” Archaeology, edited by Y. Hamilakis, 40–58. Oxford: Oxbow.
Heidegger, M. 2001 [1951]. “Building Dwelling Thinking.” In Poetry, Language, Thought, by M. Heidegger and translated by A. Hofstadter, 141–159. New York: Perennial Classics.
Hodder, I. 1982. “Theoretical Archaeology: A Reactionary View.” In Symbolic and Structural Archaeology, edited by I. Hodder. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511558252.002
____. and C. Cessford. 2004. “Daily Practice and Social Memory at Catalhoyuk.” American Antiquity 69(1): 17–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/4128346
____. and P. Pels. 2010. “History Houses: A New Interpretation of Architectural Elaboration at Çatalhöyük.” In Religion in the Emergence of Civilization: Çatalhöyük as a Case Study, edited by I. Hodder, 163–186. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511761416.007
Holtorf, C. 2006. “Studying Archaeological Fieldwork in the Field: Views from Monte Polizzo.” In Ethnographies of Archaeological Practice, edited by M. Edgeworth, 81–94. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press.
Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203466025
Jacobsen, T. 1992. “Crusading to the Past.” The Oriental Institute News and Notes 133: 1–8, 12–14.
Lloyd, S. 1980. Foundations in the Dust: The Story of Mesopotamian Exploration (revised edition). New York: Thames and Hudson.
Lucas, G. 2001. Critical Approaches to Fieldwork: Contemporary and Historical Archaeological Practice. London: Routledge.
Macgillivray, J. A. 2001. Minotaur: Sir Arthur Evans and the Archaeology of the Minoan Myth. London: Pimlico.
Mallowan, M. E. L. 1977. Mallowan’s Memoirs. New York: Dodd, Mead.
McGuire, R. H. 2008. Archaeology as Political Action. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Morgan, C. 2009. “(Re)Building Çatalhöyük: Changing Virtual Reality in Archaeology.” Archaeologies 5 (3): 468–487. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11759-009-9113-0
____. 2012. Emancipatory Digital Archaeology. PhD diss., University of California.
Panofsky, E. 1972. Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism: An Inquiry into the Analogy of the Arts, Philosophy, and Religion in the Middle Ages. New York: World Publishing.
Powell, D. 1973. The Villa Ariadne. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Schofield, J. 2011. Great Excavations: Shaping the Archaeological Profession. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
Shankland, D. 1996. “C?atalho?yu?k: The Anthropology of an Archaeological Presence.” In On the Surface: C?atalho?yu?k 1993–95, edited by I. Hodder, 349–358. Cambridge: McDonald Institute Monograph.
Shanks, M. and R. H. McGuire. 1996. “The Craft of Archaeology.” American Antiquity 61(1): 75–88.
Silberman, N. A. 1982. Digging for God and Country: Exploration in the Holy Land, 1799–1917. New York: Doubleday.
Silverstein, P. 2004. “Of Rooting and Uprooting: Kabyle Habitus, Domesticity and Structural Nostalgia.” Ethnography, 5(4): 553–578. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1466138104048828
Sparks, R. T. 2013. “Publicising Petrie: Financing Fieldwork in British Mandate Palestine (1926–1938).” Present Pasts 5(1): 1–15. Available online: http://www.presentpasts.info/article/view/pp.56/108
Stevenson, A. 2012. “‘We Seem to be Working in the Same Line’: A.H.L.F. Pitt-Rivers and W.M.F. Petrie.” Bulletin of the History of Archaeology 22(1): 4–13
Thomas, J. 1993. “The Hermeneutics of Megalithic Space.” In Interpretative Archaeology, edited by C. Tilley, 73–98. Oxford: Berg.
____. 1996. Time, Culture and Identity: An Interpretive Archaeology. London: Routledge.
Tilley, C. 1994. A Phenomenology of Landscapes. Explorations in Anthropology. Oxford: Berg Publishers.
Trigger, B. G. 2006. A History of Archaeological Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tringham, R. 1994. “Engendered Places in Prehistory.” Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 1(2): 169–203. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09663699408721209
____. 2012. “Sensing the Place of Çatalhöyük: The Rhythms of Daily Life.” In Last House on the Hill: BACH Area Reports from C?atalho?yu?k, Turkey, edited by R. Tringham and M. Stevanovic´, 531–552. Los Angeles, CA: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press.
Wylie, A. 2006. “Moderate Relativism, Political Objectivism.” In The Archaeology of Bruce Trigger: Theoretical Empiricism, edited by R. F. Williamson and M. S. Bisson, 25–35. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press.
Yarrow, T. 2006. “Sites of Knowledge: Different Ways of Knowing an Archaeological Excavation.” In Ethnographies of Archaeological Practice, edited by M. Edgeworth, 20–32. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press.
Published
2015-09-02
Issue
Section
Research Article
How to Cite
Morgan, C., & Eddisford, D. (2015). Dig Houses, Dwelling, and Knowledge Production in Archaeology. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, 2(1), 169–193. https://doi.org/10.1558/jca.v2i1.22331
