I have much sympathy for Shannon Dawdy's eloquent argument in favour of reorienting archaeology ‘away from reconstructions of the past and towards problems of the present’ (p. 140). The topic is timely, her argument sharp, and the discussion of the issues at hand benefits from them being put on the spot in rather dramatic fashion. I do not agree with those who might argue that such calls for more social relevance in a humanities subject are merely the symptom of an unhelpful but prevalent insecurity and demonstrate a lack of confidence in one's own academic abilities. At the same time, Dawdy's passionate and courageous argument would have benefited from additional analysis of the subject matter at hand. As it stands, I have two main reservations to her paper.
Firstly, Dawdy misses an important distinction, which is that between value and use. Archaeology is valuable when people enjoy it in some way, usually because they appreciate that archaeology is an equally exciting and meaningful practice generating significant stories that are simultaneously about both the past and the present (Holtorf 2007; Smith, Messenger and Soderland, forthcoming). By contrast, archaeology is useful when people employ it for their own particular purposes and gain concrete benefits beyond those deriving from stories about past and present as such. As Dawdy points out, such uses may be very dubious. The usefulness of Kossinna's method and account of prehistory for Nazi politics is well known. By the same token, archaeologists like D.G. Hogarth, Nelson Glueck and Max von Oppenheim proved useful as wartime spies supporting the colonialist and imperialist agendas of their governments in London, Washington and Berlin (Richter 2008). A list of significant heritage sites sent in 1998 under the 1954 Hague Convention by one country of the former Yugoslavia to UNESCO proved useful to another country in that each one of these sites was specifically targeted in order to undermine the population's morale (Stone, with Bajjaly, 2008, 7). And, arguably, in the preparation and aftermath of the recent Gulf War, archaeologists cooperating with the Allied forces were useful once again in order to make the occupation of Iraq more acceptable to politicians and citizens in the coalition states (Hamilakis 2009). On the other hand, some uses of archaeology, such as those improving contemporary agricultural practices, are, of course, not dubious or problematic at all (Isendahl 2008). What makes some uses of archaeology laudable and others debatable is first and foremost their association with different values and the agendas that derive from them. We therefore always need to ask to whom and to what archaeology's usefulness is valuable and why.
The meanings of value and usefulness overlap with each other, as uses are valuable and value can be useful, but the terms are not synonymous. The differences between the terms have been lost entirely in Dawdy's argument and led her to the catchy but misconceived one-liner that ‘archaeology has been very useful lately, but primarily to itself’ (p. 138). The growing attention archaeology is giving to its own contemporary social context and to the people it affects – behind which Dawdy suspects archaeology's own self-interests – have in fact first and foremost not made it more useful, but more valuable, and not to itself but to others. Surely the point of public archaeology and community archaeology is not to justify an essentially imperial, colonial and racist discipline that was otherwise useless, as Dawdy implies, but to appraise critically and in many cases celebrate archaeology's value to a wide range of constituencies (Merriman 2004a; Holtorf 2007; Svanberg and Wahlgren 2007; Ronayne 2007). I thus take public archaeology to mean something much more profound than merely public relations or public outreach – which is never altruistic wherever it occurs. Most academic disciplines may indeed not be sending out their professors, inviting community members to contribute to academic research proposals. But then again, most other disciplines do not commonly deal with something as cherished as a community's ancestral past – in fact the ancestors’ very bones may be at stake – and as meaningful as a community's way of life and collective identity rooted in a shared past, even though that past might be presumed rather than reliably known.
My claim that Dawdy has sold short the value of archaeology to local communities and various other publics should not, however, take anything away from the pertinence of her overall argument concerning the need to consider archaeology's usefulness beyond constructing pasts and building heritage: what kinds of problems of the present can archaeology help in solving? In precisely what way is archaeology about the present rather than the past? Surely it is not sufficient that archaeology adopt the topics and ideas that enjoy currency in present society, as this may show little else than archaeology's entanglement in contemporary ideas (Wilk 1985). Indeed, the very desirability of being ‘useful’ – and the fact that this comes up in a commissioned debate just now – might just be the latest example of that same entanglement, linking archaeology to notions of profitability and revenue that of late have been governing Western economies in the face of competition from low-wage countries, especially in a state of economic crisis. But the burgeoning interest in the values of heritage and archaeology, as well as the trend towards applied archaeologies, might equally well be explained by a genuine concern archaeologists have gradually been developing for the role they play in contemporary society and the relations they establish with local communities.
My second reservation concerns a gap in Dawdy's analysis of archaeology's usefulness. She is right to insist that archaeology should be oriented towards contemporary problems and provide concrete benefits, beyond merely telling new stories in relation to the past – even though such stories are very significant, too (Holtorf 2007; forthcoming). She is also right to distinguish the uses of archaeological heritage from those of archaeological knowledge. Whereas the former may be useful for creating a pleasant environment for relaxation and rehabilitation, for cultural tourism or for sustainable social development in countries with strong internal tensions (Smith 2006; Lafrenz Samuels 2009),Footnote 1 the latter may be useful for informing environmental policies, for achieving justice in court or for providing closure to the families of victims of mass murder (Rogers 2004; Gould 2007). Both dimensions of archaeological usefulness are important, and archaeologists will no doubt need to give more attention to them in the future than they do now. What Dawdy, like Sabloff (2008), overlooked is that archaeological methods and ways of reasoning, too, can be useful.
Excavation, for instance, can have additional benefits besides those it has as an academic method to secure evidence that helps academics reconstruct the past. Digging for, and discovering, clues from the past create opportunities for reflection and dialogue both among different participants and between participants and onlookers. Excavation is an exciting and multifaceted approach to investigating what metaphorically lies ‘beneath’. It affects those digging in more ways than by merely providing data. Recovered artefacts can trigger memories and make the past tangible, even bring history to life by evoking past individuals who may have last handled the very same piece before you did. If the artefacts come from the recent past, they may refresh memories and facilitate sharing these with others, whether or not all these recollections are actually historically accurate (Arén et al. 2007). If they are from a more distant past, artefacts can provoke reflections about what it means to be human more generally, irrespective of which particular period the items in question may derive from. All this does not only provide beneficial experiences for each individual, but can also meet important social and cultural aims by giving pause for thought about the grand questions of the course of cultural evolution and human history and by stimulating contact and conversation across different generations and communities (Svanberg and Wahlgren 2007; Burström 2007). Indeed, it is in the area of method that archaeology can very well serve purposes of education, community cohesion and entertainment as suggested by Barbara Little and cited by Dawdy:
• Teaching archaeology may not make for better schools but it can make for better learning. Through integrating a wide range of methods and knowledge from various disciplines into holistic archaeological reasoning, students not only can be better motivated, but also can achieve broader educational goals (Synnestvedt 2008, 277–304). They do not simply learn archaeology, but they learn many different skills and insights with archaeology. This also applies to students with special needs (Downum and Price 1999, 230). By the same token, a recent project at Jämtland's Museum Jamtli in Sweden demonstrated that heritage can offer a stimulating learning environment that motivates unemployed young adults to continue studies and thus increase their chances on the labour market (Palomaa 2008).
• Archaeological projects can relieve racial, social, gender and other community tensions. Through digging, neighbours who belong to different communities can come together and learn to communicate with each other, whatever they may actually find and find out about the past (Synnestvedt 2008). Intriguingly, this can even happen retrospectively. It matters to members of communities today that a historical archaeology project investigating the history of archaeological study and commemoration at Franklin Court at Independence National Historic Park in Philadelphia found a significant involvement over time of African Americans, organized union labourers, Native Americans, female leaders and gay archaeologists (Jeppson 2006).
• For the past 15 years, millions around the world have been watching the highly entertaining documentary series Time Team on the British Channel 4.Footnote 2 More than enough have been willing to pay £50 to the York Archaeological Trust for the entertaining experience of ‘A Day on the Dig’, or 50p for looking through the fence observing an actual archaeological excavation (Holtorf 2007, 19, 25). Whatever else it may have accomplished, archaeological research has certainly become a form of popular entertainment.
There are many other fascinating examples of archaeology's usefulness, yielding benefits from the heritage itself, from new research results and from research methodologies. William Rathje's classic Garbage project is an obvious highlight (Rathje and Murphy 1992), as are Clark Erickson's (1992) experiments with the ancient technique of raised field agriculture in South America, and the archaeologically informed marking of US Nuclear Waste Disposal Sites (Benford 1999, Part 1). Christian E. Downum and Laurie J. Price's (1999) summary of the state of applied archaeology at the end of the 1990s provides a good starting point, although it omits some work and surveys a very diverse range of studies – not all of which might truly be called applied and useful in the present sense at all. It is not clear to me, for example, to what extent cultural resource management, commercial archaeology and public outreach projects themselves ‘apply’ archaeology or make it useful to solving problems of the present. They rather seem to be techniques for preserving archaeological sites or the academic information they contain, financing archaeological research and communicating its results – all of which may (or may not) be valuable and indeed useful, but it remains to be explained in what way.Footnote 3
Over only the past five years much new research has been published that contributes to developing the field of useful and applied archaeologies in new and exciting ways. For example, in Places in mind Paul Shackel and Erve Chambers (2004) published a series of case studies for how public archaeology can be practised as applied archaeology, and Barbara Little and Paul Shackel (2007) edited a related volume entitled Archaeology as a tool of civic engagement, containing more topical studies of applied archaeology – although it has to be said that a number of chapters in both volumes fall well into Dawdy's category of ‘inventing traditions and building heritage’ (p. 140) and lack other clear uses. Maggie Ronayne (2007) presented a brilliant example of archaeology's usefulness in an account of her long-standing involvement in the Ilısu Dam Campaign. She spells out how archaeological expertise can be beneficially applied in order to support the interests of local communities in south-east Turkey. Jeremy Sabloff (2008), too, contributed to the chorus of advocates for useful and applied archaeologies. He has argued forcefully and at book length that there should be more ‘action archaeology’ that ‘matters’ in the modern world. More exciting work is under way (Zimmermann and Welch, forthcoming). All these various applications of archaeology insist that the discipline is eminently useful. At the same time, those uses should be distinguished from the values of public archaeology and community archaeologies that do not necessarily fall into the category of applied archaeology.
Nobody suggested that archaeology is the only answer to the world's problems and needs, but applied archaeology certainly can make a contribution. The sort of usefulness of archaeology, for which Dawdy gives some examples which I have supplemented, adds to the value of archaeology in present society. Usefulness is, however, always relative to specific values and agendas (in the plural) and never able to substitute for value (in the singular). Dawdy's paper is useful for Cambridge University Press's ambitions to sell a competitive product and pay wages to its employees, among other concrete benefits. But that usefulness, helpful as it is, relies on the values that carry higher education, academic scholarship and the market economy. CUP's benefits cannot substitute for the intellectual value to academic archaeology which Dawdy's provocations clearly have, too. Something similar might be said about the usefulness of public archaeology and community archaeologies: their value matters more.
