Acts of discovery: an ethnography of an archaeological excavation more

This is the only full length report of an ethnography of an archaeological dig to have been published. It describes the everyday events that take place on the excavation of a Bronze Age ring-ditch cemetery, situated in the east of England, from the viewpoint of an ethnographer. The author asks the question: what are the conditions - social, material, cognitive, practical - which make archaeological interpretation possible? His ethnography focuses on the acts of discovery through which archaeologists encounter and interpret material evidence of the past. An ‘act of discovery’ is defined as 'the (temporal) relation between (embodied) subjects and (emerging) objects, mediated through the use of tools'. This is where the cultural agency of archaeologists, in giving form to material patterns, comes into contact with the sheer ‘resistance’ of unfolding material evidence. It is in these practical encounters, the author argues, that knowledge of the past is ultimately produced and reproduced.