In answering the question ‘why excavate?’, much of the discussion in this stimulating session was pitched at the level of managerial considerations (in commercial archaeology) or the pros and cons of excavation for the discipline as a whole (in academic archaeology), with some attention paid to issues of publication. While acknowledging the great importance of that debate, and the many interesting points put forward, I would like to suggest that excavation also has significance for archaeologists on a much deeper, existential, level.

Archaeology is, of course, a very broad profession which includes many different kinds of investigative technique, of which excavation is only one. Excavation, however, is what might be called a core method, the essential principles and rationales of which inform our approach to all the others. Thus in a landscape archaeology project, for example, archaeologists may make use of geophysical survey, earthwork survey, aerial photography, historical documentation and so on; indeed, it may not be necessary to carry out excavation. A good landscape archaeologist can tell a great deal about the development of the landscape just from walking over it. But the particular ‘ways of seeing’ and ‘ways of thinking’ that enable him or her to decipher the landscape, or even to perceive the layering and intercutting of landscape features in the first place, derive in large part from the craft tradition of excavation.

John Cherry gave a good example of why excavation is not always necessary when he described the intensive survey of Thespiai in Greece carried out by himself and John Bintliff. But the fact is that, being archaeologists, they were drawing their approach and perspective from disciplinary traditions that were heavily influenced by excavation. As a result, the survey of the city they produced was very different from one that would have been carried out by a geographer or building surveyor, or any other kind of non-archaeologist. Our rootedness in excavation gives us a particular and distinctive slant upon landscapes and material objects, whether or not we are actually digging. This is what I mean when I say that excavation is a core method.

As a core method, then, it is necessary for an archaeologist to gain some experience and mastery of it in order to ‘be’ an archaeologist. Something of the essence of archaeology really is bound up with excavation, and not just in terms of its image in popular culture. Excavation is to archaeology as ethnography is to cultural and social anthropology. It may well be, as Björn Nilsson suggests, a kind of institutionalized ‘clearing of the ground’ ritual that society carries out prior to development taking place, and thus a part of the construction of modernity. But it is also a crucial rite of passage for archaeologists to undergo in becoming archaeologists.

Archaeology is fortunate to have such a distinctive method at the heart of its discipline. Excavation affords an encounter with material remains that is qualitatively different from the encounter that occurs, for example, between historians and documents, geologists and rock strata, or geographers and land-/cityscapes. The excavation site is where archaeologists come into direct physical contact with unfolding material evidence that has the capacity to ‘kick back’ against applied ideas, models and theories. As any digger can testify, what is unearthed in the course of that engagement can often confound or surprise, forcing modification of schemes of interpretation. This is where theories can be tested against a touchstone of reality, and remoulded in a collaborative and creative act of interpretation that takes account of the resistance of emerging evidence. It is in an important sense the practical ground of archaeological knowledge. We lose touch with it at our peril!

A problem is that the very structure of the archaeological profession encourages us to do exactly that – to lose touch with excavation, impelling us on a career progression into management or teaching. We become project managers, research associates and professors, who rarely get the time to go out in the field, and mostly rely on others to excavate for us. The irony here is that as soon as we become good at the practice of excavating, achieving some sort of mastery of it, we are forced to leave it behind. That is, in my opinion, a great loss not only to the individuals concerned (though they themselves may not see it that way), but also to the craft of archaeological excavation itself, for much of the expertise entailed in excavating is embodied knowledge: there is a tacit dimension to it that cannot be taught in a classroom or put into a procedures manual. As in any craft, experienced practitioners are needed to pass on competencies through example and demonstration. Excavation is where a James Mellart or Ian Hodder (or indeed any skilled excavator, from site director to site assistant, whether well known or not) picked up their skills in the first place. It is also where they put themselves back into the practical craft tradition of excavation, passing on the benefit of their acquired experience of all the sites they have ever dug, and no doubt some of their accumulated quirks too, to subsequent generations. Without this mode of cultural transmission, the practice of excavation as a set of craft skills would quickly degenerate into mere enactment of procedures.

There is also the problem, brought about in part by the current economic downturn, that it is very difficult for students of archaeology to find work with archaeological units. The jobs available require experience which can only be acquired by getting a job – a classic catch-22. This means that, in so far as archaeology is a craft, many potential future archaeologists are missing out on an essential part of their craft apprenticeship. The traditional initiation or rite of passage of excavation on the path to becoming an archaeologist is partially blocked.

The asking of the question ‘why excavate?’ suggests that archaeology has momentarily lost its footing in this remarkable fieldwork practice, which is so inextricably bound up with the historical development and identity of the discipline. But such moments of ontological doubt are actually opportunities to rediscover the grounds of our very being as archaeologists, to acknowledge the centrality of digging in the essential spirit of the archaeological enterprise, to redouble efforts in helping students get the experience of digging they need, and perhaps even to find our own way back – to make a return to excavation, one of the principal sites of the production and reproduction of knowledge about the past.