Heritage is the discourse that sustains archaeology.  Yet, it is easy to imagine a relationship between archaeology and heritage that grants archaeology self-determination.  We often see this in attempts to control what heritage meanings are taken from the archaeological record whether for positive retributive ends or to stem the misuse of the record in modern political action.  These efforts, however, mistakenly assume that the archaeological record is independent from the heritage claims made on it.  We think that archaeologists adopting this position are self-deceived.  What is missing for them is an appreciation of the contingencies that situate archaeology within heritage, an understanding that would allow archaeologists to see that they are not only participants in the heritage discourse but subjects of it.  The dominant self-perception now is that archaeology is a parallel and competing discourse with heritage that can be used to validate heritage claims.  It is our contention that this is nothing more than an ideology sustained by the uncritical application of very specific social powers in archaeological practice.  It is our goal to examine some impacts of this construction.

    One inspiration for this approach comes from Michel Foucault’s essay ‘What is an Author?’ (1984).  Foucault answers this question by rewording it and showing us how to form the same questions of ourselves: how does the idea of an author contribute to the discursive existence of individual authors, works of literature, and specific practices of appropriation, citation or criticism?  What does the existence of an author do for a text? And, how can we say that some texts have no author?  We believe that these questions define the action of archaeologists within heritage, and we hold out the questioning as a condition for the success of our engagement with heritage today.

    To explain we outline what the heritage discourse looks like if we step back from the narrow view of it that archaeology often promotes for itself.  In the example of looting archaeological sites, we think the discourse is made most clear.  Archaeologists assert that the value of an artifact is lost when it is looted because the context of recovery is not recorded.  Obviously there are others who feel that an artifact’s value is not determined this way, whether they are the looters or the buyers of looted materials.  Our point is that none of these actors are unaware of the diverse potential values of the artifacts being unearthed.  Rather, they are selecting from among these the values (and the actions required to realize them) that they believe are the most important.  For each, the looter, the art dealer, and the archaeologist, a choice is made.  This common ground created by the recognition of (though not necessarily respect for) alternative values brings these interest groups together as a recognizable heritage discourse.  Put another way, this approach shows that there is nothing inherent to artifacts that makes them valuable except the claims that are made on them in heritage debates over how they should be used.  We extend this thought by considering how different positions within the heritage discourse are created and how these positions come to be uncritically embraced.

    Certainly making claims and appeals to a distinct set of values is how each group establishes a position.  Yet, these value systems are only made substantial through claims to particular heritages.  Each group, that is, cites the heritage of their position (i.e. their existence as something other than a—God forbid—spurious formation created solely by the demands of current debate) to both legitimize themselves and give credence to why their values should be embraced.  For example, archaeology appeals to the inherent value of the knowledge it produces regarding artifacts because that knowledge is a unique and universal benefit for humankind.  This ideal is argued to supercede any other use of archaeological artifacts.  The problem, however, is that this rhetoric is confused for fact producing an imagined position for archaeology disengaged from the heritage discourse for which it was created.  From this basis, heritage is not a debate for archaeology, but an arena for archaeological polemics aimed at derailing any direct challenge to archaeology including analyses of archaeology as a social practice in the modern world.  Clearly this is an unproductive situation to be in since it not only rejects alternatives but is based in self-delusion.

    To support this assertion we offer a pair of studies on the position of archaeology in public to show how this position is produced through the application of social power.  We focus on public archaeology because it is important to escape the limitations of archaeology’s self-image in order to understand the images of archaeology that illustrate and determine its heritage.  We focus on power because we want to examine how archaeology, notably the claim to be an archaeologist, is a socially powerful act that is easily manipulated in the heritage debates.  The first is a discussion of images that support a facelessness for archaeological practice underwritten by archaeological training and professionalism.  The second is the story of a public project in which the community where the work was situated expressed strong support for archaeology, but then used it in a way that challenged the capacity for archaeologists to control the implications of their work.

Lost Faces
    This image is the cover of a popular archaeology text and is typical of images showing archaeologists found in textbooks.  For the most part these present men and women surveying, excavating, sorting, and recording archaeological data.  These images are helpful since they illustrate to students the everyday scientific procedures utilized to create the archaeological record from its remains.  However, we are rarely introduced to the archaeologists since the image subject is archaeology: what we do, not who we are.  Yet, these images do not only serve archaeology in training the finite public of students.  They also make archaeologists into who we are outside the discipline both for students and the rest of the publics who gaze at them (cf. Dobres 2000; also Moser 1998).  It is unfortunate that these are people without faces, lacking eye contact, and thus failing to engage at all with the public they speak to.

    This is a foundational issue for understanding archaeological heritage because these images are an assertion that in archaeology personality does not matter, technique does; or, that the social and cultural context of a project is (made) irrelevant as long as the project follows the professional standards defined by the discipline.  Drawing lines that define archaeology and to say that within them archaeologists can police themselves, however, does not help.  It is time to learn the significance for archaeology of public actions like NAGPRA and the Burra Charter is not their impact on archaeological research practice, but how they make archaeology aware of its contingent public cultural existence.  Indigenous and other critics of archaeology seek explicitly the power that makes archaeology legitimate, and they have established that this is the same power that legitimized their domination and allowed archaeology to go on as it did and for the most part, as these images imply, still does.  We believe that to respond to these public claims we need to articulate our work with the public in their terms, and this begins by developing a method for recognizing ourselves in those terms.  This means being archaeologists with faces [slide] who meet non-archaeologists in public to discuss what archaeology means and can do in our shared world.  And it means relocating the source of archaeological knowledge from that gained from the archaeological record and the power that we alone control in defining what the record is, to the public dialogues we are engaged in that lead us to investigate the record and which are created through a public power shared and at times claimed: the creation of archaeology as social action.

Eastport, Maryland
    To explore this approach we turn to a story of a public archaeology undertaken in the community of Eastport, a section of Annapolis, Maryland developed by land speculators as a working-class community at the end of the 19th century [Slide  ].  Eastport is within the orbit of gentrification that took hold in the historic district of Annapolis, and since the 1970s property has gone from affordable to prohibitive.  At any moment several structures are undergoing costly renovations [Slides   and  ], their cellars and foundations re-excavated, and new additions and even entire homes built in their place [Slides   and  ], all along guidelines established by Eastport’s “Neighborhood Conservation Zoning Overlay”.   [Slides   and  , “the ultimate in costly renovation] We were invited to do archaeological research in Eastport by Peg Wallace, one of the authors of this zoning, a real estate agent of some 45 years experience, and a leading voice in the public history of the community.   She led us to two homeowners who hosted our field school for two years.

    Eastport is one of the few sections of Annapolis explored by the Archaeology in Annapolis project outside of the city’s historic district, and we are literally the only archaeologists to conduct systematic excavations in working-class Eastport, more or less, ever.  As such, one of the first questions we asked was, “Is there archaeology in Eastport?” Where we looked, we didn't find it. We produced a large number of artifacts from fill contexts and a small number of artifacts from an extant layer of sheet trash across our two sites, and we found no interpretable features save for utility lines that could be located on early 20th-century maps, and that had been re-excavated and replaced within the last ten years [Slide 7a].  However, these slides show some of the archaeologies that were undertaken in Eastport prior to our arrival or concurrent with our own work, yet independent of any archaeologist [Slides   and  ].  What we mean is the archaeology of Eastport has been undertaken by the homeowners themselves, particularly the newer settlers in the community, as they renovated and kept up their houses.  Based on what neighbors told us while we worked, we now conclude that much of the archaeology of Eastport is well known by its residents.  Not only do they know where we should dig, they have already identified and excavated features, or concealed them in order to subvert the city’s building codes [Slides   and  ].  In pulling out wells and cisterns, and replacing utility lines, they have generally learned more about their homes than we managed to learn in two summers of excavation.  At best, we did no more than to duplicate a part of the work they’ve already done: we excavated the fill they put down and exposed what they saw when they moved in.  Still, no one was disappointed with us for our lack of finds.

    Having established this local knowledge of archaeology, one of our hosts presented us with a mystery.  Despite his expertise regarding his property, which we underscore here, this homeowner knows a history of his property that is neither convincing nor plausible.  He has a graduate education and has researched his property title himself.  He knows that the neighborhood was first platted in 1868, and that before then the area was open farmland.  He also knows that his lot was first purchased along with two other lots from the Mutual Building Association in the 1890s.  But he insists that his house [Slide  ] pre-dates all the other houses in the neighborhood, and that it was built in 1855.  He’s even written “1855” as the date of construction for the house on his title.  Despite all evidence to the contrary, even after we failed to find features or artifacts on his property pre-dating the late 19th century, he has not changed his story and still declares, “my deed says 1855.”  We may not believe him, but he has installed his 1855 date in the permanent land records of the county.  How he can maintain his statements against ready evidence is one mystery.  The fact that we have had no impact on his ideas about his own house after working on his property for two summers is another mystery.

    These findings lead back to the question we originally posed: is there archaeology in Eastport?  They confirm that there is, even though it was generated by the residents themselves.  The real mystery then is why were we invited in.  One fear in all archaeological research is that there may be no archaeological record where we are working, or for what we are working on.  In such case, why would we be digging?  In Eastport we have learned that in fact there is not much of an archaeological record that is not already known.  So to understand why we were there, we ask a new question: What is archaeology good for in Eastport? How does it exist in this community?  These are questions posed for archaeologically-rich historic Annapolis by Mark Leone and Parker Potter (Potter and Leone 1992, Potter 1994), but with the lack of a discoverable archaeology in Eastport we see a new way to answer them.  Our supposition is that archaeology is one of an array of practices that allows people to dwell in Eastport, a Heideggerian technology (1977:12-13, Conley 1993) for being Eastporters, and for that reason alone they value archaeology even though it has nothing whatsoever to tell them.  Thus we have a clear example not only of the discursive life of archaeology outside of our discipline, but a specific line on techniques perhaps appropriated from preservationists and archaeologists who have worked at making historic districts for years.  This realization is forced by treating archaeology like Foucault’s author: what does an archaeologist do for heritage, or for that matter, what does an archaeologist do for archaeology?

    Reflecting on the apparently intense interest in archaeology of Peg Wallace, the homeowners, and that expressed by neighborhood visitors, the discourse of heritage surrounding archaeology in the community of Eastport takes shape.  It is positioned alongside home ownership and the home-buying market, just as historic preservation in Annapolis has always depended on homeowners [read: voters] for support.  Note that through the years homeowners in Eastport repeatedly petitioned the Historic Annapolis Foundation for coveted placards identifying many houses in the historic district as historic, and were refused.  At the same time the existing discourse on heritage in this neighborhood is responsible for designating one part of Eastport as historic, and for establishing the ordinance for appropriate architecture.  It has inflated the housing market and interposed new procedures to zoning review and home inspection.  The same institution also erected its own historic markers and signs [Slide  ] and established a museum [Slides   and  ] with well-researched exhibits oriented to the community rather than tourists.  All of this is supported by funding from the state but was initiated by local business owners and realtors, and paid for with developer money.   We have had to recognize this discourse in understanding who we are to Eastporters.  Still, while this discourse granted us public significance and seemed to have given us face in the community, it comes bundled with troublesome ethical matters that our internally focused professional standards fail to prepare us for.

    Ultimately, all we are doing in Eastport is granting the legitimacy to their claims that professional archaeologists are entrusted and expected to provide.  We validate recent settlers by identifying their homes as historic. We settle half a dozen field school students on their property, recover a number of curiosities, and write them letters and site reports that go on file in official repositories with their carefully-researched and (re)worded deeds.  Ultimately, Eastporters already had archaeology, what they lacked was archaeologists until we showed up with our tools, techniques, and, what really mattered, our power to define something as archaeological.  In other words, in this public archaeology we gained face and lost it all at once.  The problem here is not one that can be solved from within archaeology, but only by institutionalizing an ethical method for articulating archaeologists with the cultures in which they work.

References
Abdo, Gaith, Gilda Anroman, Brian Jay Dyson, John Harmon, Terrie Hruzd, Carl Morgan, and Trish Radigan.  1996.  Eastport Neighborhood Study, Annapolis, Maryland.  Graduate Program in Historic Preservation, University of Maryland at College Park, College Park, Maryland.

Conley, Verena Andermatt.  1993.  Preface, in Rethinking Technologies, Verena Andermatt Conley, ed., pp. ix-xiv.  University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Dobres, Marcia-Anne. 2000. Technology and Social Agency: Outlining a Practice Framework for Archaeology.  Blackwell Publishers, London.

Foucault, Michel.  1984.  ‘What is an Author?’  In The Foucault Reader, Paul Rabinow, ed., pp. 101-120.  Pantheon Books, New York.

Heidegger, Martin.  1977.  The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays.  Willaim Lovitt, Translator.  Harper & Row, New York.

Moser, Stephanie. 1998. Ancestral Images: The Iconography of Human Origins.  Cornell University Press, Ithaca.

Potter, Parker B., Jr. 1994. Public Archaeology in Annapolis: A Critical Approach to History in Maryland’s Ancient City.  Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington.

Potter, Parker B., Jr. and Mark P. Leone. 1992. Establishing the roots of historical consciousness in Modern Annapolis, Maryland. In Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kreamer, and Steven D. Lavine, eds., pp. 476-505. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington.