To the general public, archaeology is equated with excavations and discoveries of objects, even treasures. Incidentally, the archaeologist Indiana Jones is only interested in objects and seemingly he does not publish very much, even if he provides academic lectures to his students from time to time. However, for most contemporary archaeologists, excavation is only one step within a global and continuous process traditionally involving six stages:
1. the definition of scientific objectives,
2. the collection of relevant data according to these objectives,
3. the analysis of these data (typologies, physical and chemical analysis, etc.),
4. the classification of these data (seriations, spatial analysis, statistics, models, etc.),
5. the interpretation of these results,
6. the validation of this interpretation.
In its broader outlines, this approach is identical to that practised in any other given scientific field, whether in the natural or the social sciences. But archaeology is without doubt the science amongst all the others with the most unfavourable ratio between the time required for the collection of data and the time needed for their interpretation. Several years of meticulous excavations, sometimes under hard physical conditions, are equivalent to the few seconds necessary for a historian to take an archive register from the bookshelf or to the nanoseconds that particle collisions take in a ‘large hadron collider’ for a physicist. The interpretation work of the historian or of the physicist only starts thereafter, just as that of the archaeologist begins after the excavation. Moreover, as we teach our students, excavation is also a destructive process, which bestows an irreparable character upon it, and the archaeologist sometimes feels guilty about this. This is why the dream of many archaeologists is a magic radar screen – which will certainly exist one day in the future and will permit us to explore in detail the soil from a distance without having to excavate.
Is the practice of archaeology without excavating a dream that could become true from now on, as is proposed by the abstract of this round table? There are, however, several poor reasons for avoiding excavation, the most important being:
1. As mentioned above, archaeological excavations are time-consuming, with a particularly unfavourable ratio between the time invested and the scientific but also academic results. Moreover, given the Anglo-Saxon funding system of short-term projects, a system that is tending to become pan-European, it is difficult to plan an excavation programme over 20 years – which nonetheless is often a reasonable time span in which to obtain significant results. But in countries in which the researchers themselves can only benefit from short-term contracts, it becomes impossible for them to plan such a long programme if they do not want to compromise their own academic career. They are forced to obtain the quickest scientific results within the tightest deadlines. But we all know that the archaeological excavations which have provided the most crucial results are large-scale excavations running over a long time period. Concerning the Neolithic, this is the case, for example, of Bouhumil Soudsky's excavations at Bylany in the Czech Republic, which took place for eight months each year over more than fifteen years (Pavl ů, Zápotocká and Soudský 1983–87); or the excavations conducted by Pierre Pétrequin on the shores of the lakes Clairvaux and Chalain in France (e.g. Pétrequin 1997); or the rescue excavations by Jens Lüning on the Aldenhoven plateau in Germany (Bölicke, Lüning and Stehli 1994). I have myself, together with Marion Lichardus-Itten, excavated the site of Kovacevo in Bulgaria during 20 years at a pace of two months per year (Lichardus-Itten et al. 2002). As a matter of fact, this was indispensable to examining a sufficiently adapted surface (2,000 square metres) for a stratified site and implementing sufficiently meticulous techniques.
2. Archaeological excavations are costly, which is a striking consequence of the preceding statement. It needs much individual energy to collect funds, and much diplomatic persuasive effort with the institutions that provide these funds and with the scientific councils they are assisted by. Academic studies do not necessarily prepare for this kind of ability.
3. Archaeological excavations require complex logistics and thus thorough organization, even social psychology, which are not necessarily taught at university. In part, archaeological excavations take place under difficult conditions, in particular in certain foreign countries. Climate and supply problems can complicate the work. It is necessary to form alliances and to have faith in the population and the local dignitaries. One has to master completely or at least partially foreign languages. In the case of rescue excavations, often a very limited amount of time is given prior to construction and, as a consequence, this requires perfect organization and constant choices.
4. More particularly, rescue excavations often take place in a hostile environment created by developers and local politicians and sometimes even by the media. Here too, diplomatic capacities and pedagogic abilities are required.
This is why one could be easily tempted to favour theoretical reflection, comparatively less costly and intellectually much richer than fieldwork. Incidentally, this is what happened, as if by chance, to one part of the so-called ‘postprocessual’ or ‘postmodern’ archaeology in the Anglo-Saxon countries. Thus a strong division can be observed in the United States between two types of archaeology which have become almost two distinct professions:
a) Rescue archaeology, related to cultural resource management (CRM), which provides important funding for rescue excavations but which publishes little and is not very present at scientific meetings and contributes little to scientific journals. In the United States, there is no centralized access to excavation reports and it is very difficult to develop a global and comprehensive image of the situation of rescue excavations in this country. Some of our North American colleagues consider the results of a greater part of these excavations almost unusable.
b) Research-oriented archaeology, which has much less funding and as a consequence excavates much less but publishes abundantly and elaborates on very sophisticated and ambitious models and theories, often based on limited data only.
Intermediate situations exist, of course. It can be stated, for example, that Ian Hodder, one of the most important leaders of ‘postprocessual archaeology’, also supervises the excavation of the famous Neolithic site of Çatal Höyük in Turkey, which involves considerable human and financial means implemented in a large-scale excavation. Nonetheless, these two trends can be identified and they tend to develop in all countries where contract archaeology is practised, as well as in countries favouring, as in the Anglo-Saxon academic system, short-term research contracts, as was mentioned above.
Turning back to rescue archaeology, there is also strong pressure exerted by certain developers to favour ‘non-intrusive’ methods during the survey of archaeological sites in the course of important construction work (highways, rapid railway systems, industrial zones and so on): aerial photography, electromagnetic conductivity or ground-penetrating radar, bore-holes and so on. But all these methods, though they make sense, are no substitute for the practice of systematic small-scale test excavations to determine archaeological sites. Thus a series of Palaeolithic sites has recently been discovered thanks to this method in the north-western part of France. Simultaneously, on the other side of the Channel, in south-western England, where systematic small-scale test excavations are much less practised, they remain largely unknown and this despite identical geo-morphological conditions. The archaeological precept we sometimes hear, at least in France, from opponents of rescue archaeology, ‘let's excavate less but better’, primarily serves the developers.
Equally, there are at least two good reasons to continue excavations and to excavate on a large scale:
1. There are almost entire continents where archaeology is virtually unknown. This is the case in large parts of Africa and even of South America. Though imposing monuments with visible remains are generally known, the less-visible sites remain unknown in wide parts of the world and for large parts of the history of mankind too. As a matter of fact, our knowledge is mostly important in the rich industrial countries, where the soil is more widely examined due to economic activity and where true archaeological surveillance exists. But this concerns only a small part of our planet. Important construction work is performed in numerous countries without any archaeological survey. To name only one example, mines of precious metals, generally under US control, in the Indonesian part of New Guinea actually affect dozens of square kilometres without any archaeological control. One agrees that international effort under the aegis of UNESCO, who nonetheless permitted the salvage of the Nubian temples during the construction of the Aswan High Dam in Egypt during the 1960s, would actually be unthinkable. One may definitely say that the question ‘who excavates?’ is, similar to pollution problems, a question for rich countries.
2. Either way, excavation according to rescue archaeology is an ethical obligation. We have to preserve the cultural heritage of humanity for future generations. It is not sufficient to construct nice theoretical models with the currently available data and according to our intellectual preoccupations of the moment. Our scientific and civic responsibility is larger than this.
It is nonetheless true that two important problems remain concerning the question ‘why excavate?’:
1. On the one hand, a considerable amount of unexploited or unpublished data exists. Yet it can be considered that an unpublished excavation is a lost excavation. Moreover, the analysis of excavation documentation by someone other than the one who has actually excavated is very often a difficult endeavour. In countries promoting contract archaeology, each private firm has, in addition, different registration standards and documentation systems, which complicates all comprehensive approaches. But the problem is foremost a financial one. Though the developers pay rescue excavations according to the ‘polluter-pays principle’, the funding of subsequent scientific research normally should be the responsibility of states. One of our priorities should thus be the definition of national scientific engagements within large, adequately funded scientific study and publishing programmes.
2. On the other hand, the constant progress of archaeological methods (see the most recently obtained results by DNA or strontium analysis) sometimes makes us feel guilty: is it good to excavate sites today, thus unknowingly destroying precious information that future generations will be able to collect better than we can? At least this could encourage us to create archaeological reserves in order to be able to excavate them later with much-improved methods. This seems to me the only good reason not to excavate. But this is only valid in very particular cases.
In the present debate, we can also invoke psychological and sociological factors. As a matter of fact, for some archaeologists excavating is a boring activity, in particular for the reasons mentioned above in this paper. Meticulousness and precision are constantly required during excavation. For a long time, the archaeologist is no more a treasure-seeker and should be vigilant even against enthusiasm. As was formulated by the French prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan in his guide Les fouilles préhistoriques, published in 1950, in the case of ‘a really great discovery’ the archaeologist ‘is truly valiant if he has the guts to sit down and light a cigarette to think’ – advice that would be politically incorrect today and even forbidden! But for certain other archaeologists, on the contrary, archaeological excavations are first and foremost a moment of living together in a group, meeting other people and having fun. This is why others prefer to flee and to excavate non-stop rather than to analyse their discoveries and to publish them.
Finally, I would like to clarify certain aspects within the debate on archaeological excavation. Many times I have emphasized rescue archaeology concerning the necessity to excavate. Yet three points should be highlighted in this regard.
The first point concerns the number of rescue excavations that should be done in each country. As a matter of fact, it is beyond our capacity to excavate everything. In France, for example, only about 15 per cent of 60,000 hectares threatened every year by construction work is excavated after a preceding survey through small-scale test excavations. I think that there is no global answer to this question. The level of rescue archaeology in each country depends on three factors: the interest of the general public in archaeology (the French public was only very little interested in archaeology before the 1970s), the economic possibilities of the country (there are no rescue excavations in poor countries) and finally scientific standards (they tend to increase regularly and consequently lift the costs of excavation).
The second point is that, with regard to rescue archaeology, the term ‘developer-funded excavation’ is extremely confusing and ambivalent. It leads one to believe that the developers are the ones who decide about the excavation and that we execute the work for them. Yet this is not the case at all. The developers do not want to fund archaeological research and initially this is not in their interest. They do not aim at detailing the chronology of the Late Bronze Age in their country, for example, or at a better understanding of the neolithization of this or that region of the world. They are simply indentured, through the laws of each country and also through the Valletta Treaty (Malta Convention) to pay for rescue excavations prior to their construction work.
The third point of possible confusion is that archaeologists, whether public or private, all do the same work. Yet this is inaccurate, as quoted in a recent paper published in 2009. In different domains, private research exists, for example, in medical research or the armament industry. However, the aim of this research is application on the one hand and financial finality on the other. The reasons are definitely economic, which is not reprehensible as such but which completely changes the goal of the work. If we take, for example, private medical research, it favours the development of new drugs for profitable diseases in rich countries to the detriment of the treatment of less-profitable diseases in poor countries. The same observations apply to private archaeology. Precisely in France, where private archaeology was introduced in 2003 by a conservative parliamentary majority, we can already state such commercial misuse when a minimalist excavation is undertaken in order to preserve the benefit of the private company. In addition, it is quite amazing that there are many critical papers on theories and ideologies developed in archaeological publications, mainly British and American, but only a few on the actual working practices of archaeologists, more particularly in the context of private archaeology (Cumberpatch and Blinkhorn 2001; Chadwick 2003; Bernbeck and McGuire forthcoming 2011).
That is why it is insufficient to ask ‘why excavate’. We should also raise the question ‘who excavates?’ and ‘how?’.
In any case, we do not have the choice: we have to excavate in order to increase the production of archaeological knowledge in still poorly documented parts of the world and in order to preserve the archaeological heritage of humanity for future generations. But we are also obliged to publish our results in a correct manner according to scientific engagements. We have to do both, to excavate and to think.
