Penn Cultural Heritage Center Lecture

One can imagine a number of reasons to study archaeological labor: to improve our excavation policies and practice, to build a more equitable discipline, or simply to enrich our understanding of the history of archaeology. But those goals might seem tangential to archaeological inquiry itself, at best providing context to archaeological findings and interpretations about the past.

In this talk, Dr. Allison Mickel argues that our perspectives on the past without the study of archaeological labor are poorer, thinner, and less accurate. She will present examples where a focus on archaeological labor reshaped or refined our understandings of artifacts, assemblages, sites, and regions, in order to demonstrate the need for global efforts to entwine ethnographic and historical studies of archaeological workers with conventional avenues of archaeological research.