This book is essential reading for any practitioner working on archaeological or heritage concerns in what has traditionally been called the “Old World.” I use “Old World” deliberately to stand in for a colonial landscape of practice that continues to hold within its infrastructure racist, classist, sexist, and heteropatriarchal ways of doing archaeology. A mirror held up to our practice, Allison Mickel's book, Why Those Who Shovel Are Silent, draws attention to archaeological labor and effectively demonstrates where our blinders are when we speak of doing community-based work. Based on six years of engaged ethnographic research with communities from Petra, Jordan, and Çatal Höyük, Turkey, Mickel's research forces us to consider what happens to those who fall into the spaces between publics/communities and archaeologists. A careful articulation follows how site workers are/were disciplined into their subject positions to downplay their scientific knowledge and emphasize their traditionalism and simplicity, creating the ideal laborer to hire.
Providing a concise and relevant history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century archaeological engagements in the Middle East, Mickel opens the book with the larger epistemic context within which the ethnography unfolds. It is here through archival research that the separation between excavators (seen as those doing intellectual labor) and laborers or workers (seen as those doing physical/manual labor) is documented, providing an epistemic critique that can then be traced into the contemporary moment. The central concern of this text is how local laborers are not marked as “community” within archaeological practice, relying on a Marxian interpretation of how those who work are, in fact, alienated from the result of the practice itself.
A key argument that runs throughout the book is how the expertise of site workers, if taken into account, could impact, and, indeed, could improve our understanding of the archaeological past. By identifying key memories from the site workers from Phillip C. Hammond's excavation at the Temple of the Winged Lions (the Nabatean temple complex at Petra) and from Ian Hodder's excavations at Çatal Höyük, Mickel traces how site workers’ understandings of archaeological finds and methods is value added. Interestingly, Mickel applies a network analysis approach to compare site records and memories about fieldwork. By demonstrating patterns of consistent memory regarding what happened at the site, and how those memories map on to the records, Mickel argues for such memory to be considered expertise. Such a formulation shifts this analysis from anecdotal to a structural and identifiable form of knowledge.
Mickel's conversations with her interlocutors are not only about expertise related to recollection of details but also of an interpretative nature. Woven through conversations are direct queries specific to key archaeological features, and with every such example, Mickel's interlocutors have much to say about social, symbolic, and functional interpretations of archaeological sites and finds. This begs the question of why they have been excluded, beyond historical circumstance. And this is where Mickel provides an interesting argument in which the financial benefit of being hired is greater for those who profess a lack of specialized archaeological knowledge, and Mickel refers to this phenomenon as “lucrative non-knowledge.”
I find this turn of phrase problematic because it introduces doubt about the character of the communities of labor; it sounds as though they are pulling a fast one on us. By linking financial gain or loss to inclusion or exclusion of archaeological knowledge production, the decision making is shifted to the laboring communities, placing the onus of exclusion onto the bodies of the laboring communities. From this perspective, they are seen to be choosing not to participate in knowledge production because doing so is not lucrative. Because it has to do with money, it makes one think that these communities are shifty and untrustworthy, thereby reinstating another colonial stereotype. Although Mickel works to underscore the persisting colonial labor management infrastructure, “lucrative non-knowledge” as a term seems to place the blame of exclusion from archaeological interpretations on the community itself. I was left wishing there was another way by which Mickel framed this insistence of ignorance, or this marginalization of local knowledge. There are moments in the text that provide the possibility of a different sort of agentive non-knowledge, such as when one of the interlocutors responded, “you didn't show us” (p. 93). This line in itself suggests that site workers knew that there was additional knowledge to be had, beyond their experiential expertise and significant traditional knowledge. This is the moment the book shifts to focus on the agency and critique coming from the community of labor. Whether it is the accusation that the knowledge was kept from them, or as in the case of Çatal Höyük, where they were willing to show hospitality but not willing to be interviewed about what it meant to excavate at the site, there is space within the text for the agency of the community to be recognized. This is the place within the text where “non-knowledge” could have been characterized as strategic rather than lucrative.
The link to capital and the notion of something being lucrative makes murky what could be seen as a strategic anticolonial response. Foregrounding money shifts the tenor of this recognition of postcolonial agency. Be that as it may, Allison Mickel's book does a heavy lift, recognizing communities of labor and forcing us all to think more equitably about all of our community partners as we conduct archaeological research.
