Thanks for this first-hand account. Again I am reminded of my experience working in advertising. The account executives are the regulators. Their primary concern is to produce work that the clients will pay for and they prefer low-risk. The creatives are at the opposite pole. They want to do something new and different enough to make a splash, cut through the clutter, and achieve recognition. Meanwhile the account planners and marketing research people (often the same people) are insisting that the project stay “on strategy,” consistent with the communication strategy that they have come up with. The problem is not which approach to choose while rejecting the others. It is always how to manage the tension and find the balance where everyone involved feels both heard and at least moderately satisfied.

From this perspective, I am inclined to agree partially with Al West. If adding risk-taking in interpretation undermines the rigor of the methods that have, indeed, produced a growing body of knowledge, that would not be a good thing. The most sensible suggestion I’ve heard is from Dan Sperber, who recommends maintaining a clean separation between evidence and interpretation. In the case of cultural anthropology that would mean avoiding the kind of writing that says, “The X believe Y.” Instead, the reader would find, “I heard A,B, and C say X, Y, and Z, from which I infer that they share a belief W.” The anthropologist serving as both court reporter and jury should not confuse the two roles.

There is a lot to think about here, but I could not agree more with your thoughts about risk taking. I think you can add to schooling also the regulatory process which governs much of the archaeology done, at least in my area. There is very little room for creativity in approaches to methodology and interpretation by permit issuers, and a pretty beady eye can be brought to bear on such attempts by the regulators who often, though not always, lacking in creativity and/or tolerance for risk. When this is combined with commercial pressures of consulting archaeology there often ends up with a cookbook approach. It takes a highly creative and risk tolerant person working in this environment to break free from such constraints. And thus, it is all the more important to start teaching such skills right from the beginning.

There are other pressures too arising from things such who the archaeologist is working for or representing and if their work is being vetted by, for instance, an indigenous community.

I saw this at play with a project I was involved with that centred on human remains and well preserved belongings. The project had a very large amount of press coverage, and there was constant pressure for pictures of the remains, something not acceptable to the local community. A solution to that problem was to make an artistic drawing of the person, dressed, and in the environment. We tried to do this, but the effort became bogged down in lack of sufficient details for the artist to get everything right since analysis was ongoing. With a certainty that the image would live well past completion of the project we were concerned that something could prove to be wrong, and that such errors, (or even aspects that were accurate) might prove offensive to some in the indigenous communities. So, in the end all the artist’s drafts were destroyed and the effort abandoned (there were other variables too, like time available and cost, but those would have been overcome where it not for the concerns about the risks).

A few months later a national newspaper commissioned their own artist to render a drawing, based on the limited information that had been made public. In a word, the drawing was awful. There was virtually nothing in it that was accurate, and it is now out there representing the project (though fortunately with a low profile due to the newspaper’s copyright on the image).

In hindsight, had we on the project team needed a greater tolerance for risk as well as a better understanding of the risks, such as someone else making an image. Had we more space for creative interpretation in some uncomfortable areas (= data gaps), we could have solved the image conundrum with a much better outcome. While I think this is a good example it is not something that is likely to be taught by project team members. Archaeology must be full of similar examples that are suppressed for a variety of reasons that range widely from project policy to participant egos.

Basically, they obliterate the human from human history, which can then lead their potential audiences to look elsewhere—e.g., fantastical movies, games, comics, books—for more inspired representations.

Cf. Ancient Aliens.

I see that this is a problem, but it keeps archaeology rigorous and generally on the right path. It’s not like it has stopped making advances or anything like that. In terms of enhancing our understanding of human history, archaeology could hardly be of greater importance. The rigour is a strength, and getting students to question every little piece of data seems like an important thing to do. So while I get the point – we certainly don’t want the past to seem so dull and uninteresting that flights of fancy seem more appealling – I don’t think there’s much that should be changed about the process, given that it is so successful and has generated so much amazing knowledge. Certainly our understanding of the human past is greater than it was in 1973, and it remains just as interesting as it ever was.

Indeed, on Twitter, where I’ve had the most engagement with my post here, the responses have primarily – and sadly – been agreement (especially by students) on this state of affairs.

I’m glad to hear of others who encourage constructive intellectual risk-taking, and am always looking for models of practice to share with others. Please don’t hesitate to send them along!

A really nice piece. Maybe too nice. Perhaps the reason why no one is responding to it is that there is nothing to question, nothing negative to say about it.

That’s interesting to me because, while you are talking specifically about archeologists, I would say that your point applies to what we might call “schooling” in general. Teaching seminars on marketing in Japan to graduate students from mostly European and Asian universities, I was always being struck by the gap between a very high level of competence (measured by being able to do what they were told to do) and a very low level of risk-taking (the only way genuinely new thinking occurs and the only thing, I told them, for which people get paid big bucks in advertising and marketing). I thought a lot about my own schooling and how grades were marked *down* (points taken off a maximum possible) instead of marked *up* (adding points for saying something fresh and thus more interesting). Then I devised the following scheme: I told them that it was easy to get a “B” in my class. Just to what you were told and turn in the work on time. It was, however, hard to get an “A.” To do that they would have to impress me by showing me something I wouldn’t have thought of myself. In classes of a dozen students or so, there were always three or four who knocked my socks off and did absolutely brilliant stuff. There were also at least two who did everything they were told to beautifully and were angry to get a “B.” When they asked why, I would simply reply, “You never took a risk. You will never succeed in business that way.”