The Proximity of Communities to the Expanse of Big Data

ABSTRACT

While individuals living near or on archaeological sites have frequently been hired around the world to dig on archaeological excavations, they have very rarely participated in the recording or documentation of those excavations. They have played even less of a role in designing the structures of either paper or electronic data management systems. In this paper, I describe some potential gaps in the archaeological record as a result of this exclusion, by detailing some ways that the communities at Çatalhöyük, Turkey and Petra, Jordan have developed highly situated forms of knowledge about these archaeological sites due to their proximities to them. I also argue that “proximity” inculcates not only forms of knowledge about an archaeological site, but also, under certain conditions, an important means of sharing knowledge between archaeologists and the communities who live where we work. I contrast proximity to the expansiveness of big data, and question whether it is possible and even preferable to imagine ways of integrating local, proximate perspectives into the rubric of big data.

KEYWORDS:

• Community archaeology
• big data
• digital archaeology
• epistemology
• Jordan
• Turkey

Introduction

When Ismail Yaşlı was a young child growing up near Çatalhöyük—the well-known Neolithic settlement in Turkey’s Konya Plain—he and his friends would play on the mound. Sometimes, they would find mirrorlike chips of jet-black glass and would wonder what could have broken to create these glossy fragments. They couldn’t think of anything in their households made of this material—and yet, it was shattered all over this slope, only two kilometers away.

Years later, as a site worker on the excavation at Çatalhöyük, Ismail learned what archaeologists called the black glass. Roger Matthews, an archaeologist on the project, termed it “obsidian,” and explained what archaeologists argue it was used for in Neolithic times. On Thursday afternoons Ismail would hear from specialists about their research. They would speak, and he would listen, about the different types of artifacts coming out of the earth at Çatalhöyük and what archaeologists could learn from them.

But the archaeologists were not the only ones to share their knowledge at Çatalhöyük. When the excavators began to recover seeds, they had questions about how the Neolithic inhabitants related with the surrounding landscape. Where did the modern versions of these seeds grow today? Where were the soil conditions appropriate for these plants to have grown in antiquity?

Ismail’s wife identified some of the seeds they found. Ismail himself showed the researchers where some of the plants they had found were growing now. And he brought some of them, including Roger Matthews, along the contemporary paths of creeks and streams, pointing out especially the range of the alluvial deposits and indicating where the soil turned too dry and sandy for such vegetation to survive.

Ismail’s ecological expertise, and his ability to answer these questions from archaeologists, came from his lifetime spent in the vicinity of Çatalhöyük: playing as a child in the grass and in the snow, walking and driving past the mound, laboring in the agricultural fields surrounding it, ultimately working for the archaeological project, and all along the way, picking up glinting, smoky, vitreous flecks. He developed an intimacy with the site, over years and across seasons, by living alongside it, by handling it, by feeling an affinity with emergent understandings of the Neolithic lifeways at the site. And the exchange of information between him and the rest of the archaeological team at Çatalhöyük was only possible because of the close relationships they developed as they worked together.

I characterize all of these factors enabling the expansion and exchange of such localized expertise as “proximity.” This term encapsulates the long-term, multi-sensory relationships that local community members have with sites, remains, and landscapes, as well as the friendships and entanglements that emerge between archaeologists and communities. Archaeologists have benefitted largely informally from this proximate knowledge for a long time, leading to the discovery of new sites (David et al. 2004; Greer 1997), the identification of various artifacts or deposits (Heider 1967; Hayden 1984; Ardren 2002), answers to ethnoarchaeological questions (Orme 1974; Stiles 1977; Lane 1994; Simms 1992), and the reconstruction of historical events (Whiteley 2002; Sheppard, Walter, and Aswani 2004; Beck and Somerville 2005; see also Trigger 1978; Echo-Hawk 2000). How to consult with the people where we work, and how to invite their perspectives—whether from a systematic, methodological, or ethical point of view—has been defined hyperlocally, differing greatly between projects operating in different locations and times.

With the advent of “big” data initiatives, it is worthwhile to consider how these new scales of data and new ways of seeing archaeological sites and landscapes might cohere with or contest ways of knowing for the inhabitants of these places. As this issue of JFA makes clear, big data has much to offer the archaeological discipline, helping to view sites from new angles and ask questions using unprecedented scales of data. I question, however, how the goals and procedures of big data—which seem to be broadly about expansion—are compatible with the specific character of local, proximate expertise. This possible disjuncture is especially pertinent as archaeologists grapple increasingly with how to engage communities in ethical and effective ways (Atalay 2012; Atalay, Clauss, McGuire, and Welch 2014; Byrne 2012; Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson 2008; Colwell-Chanthaphonh et al. 2010; Richardson and Almansa-Sanchez 2015; Pyburn 2011; Silliman 2008; Tully 2007), and as the need to center local knowledge is discussed in social science and policy circles more broadly (Adams, Miller-Korth, and Brown 2004; Berkes, Colding, and Folke 2000; Burawoy 2005; Innes and Booher 2010; Lassiter 2005; Minkler and Wallerstein 2011; Usher 2000).

Who is part of a “local” community differs greatly by context (Pyburn 2011). It is impossible to draw any concrete radial distance around an archaeological site and imagine this to be a boundary between “local” and “foreign” or “outsider.” Furthermore, those who live on or around an archaeological site may not have much stake or interest in what happens to the site; instead, there may be descendent groups, diasporic communities or others living away for whom the archaeological site plays an essential role in collective memory, identity, and self-determination. This is especially true, of course, in the legacies of forced displacement, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.

The definition of a “local community” that I use here is tied to my goal of interrogating proximity as a source of unique knowledge. Proximity, and its associated knowledges, are deeply rooted in physical place. Accordingly, for me, those with proximate knowledge live on or near the archaeological site, giving them an embedded, longterm, and everyday experience of the site. Just as “local,” however, does not exist in a binary with “foreign,” proximate knowledge is not something that one either wholly possesses or lacks. Someone who spends a great deal of time at an archaeological site may possess some degree of proximate knowledge; a person who is born in a place but spends most of their life in another will possess less. Likewise, proximate knowledge is not a total way of knowing a site—it is a particularly positioned and partial way of seeing and knowing archaeological remains and assemblages. One might also know a site on the basis of formal education, or oral history, or art, or archaeological research, all of which complement, overlap, and conflict with proximity in varied ways.

My intention here is to draw out some of the contours of how proximate knowledge can be defined, and to see how these contours match with the aims and affordances of big data initiatives. Using ethnographic research that I have conducted in Turkey and Jordan since 2010, I sketch out some kinds of knowledge that come from proximity. I question how these forms of knowledge might be missed by big data initiatives, and whether it is possible or even desirable to imagine ways of incorporating proximate knowledge into big data. Right now, across scientific disciplines, traditional and local forms of knowledge are beginning to be recognized as expert and archaeology is just starting to get its fingertips around justice-oriented approaches to community engagement. This process has involved some amount of reckoning with the consequences of both archaeological practice and epistemology. A similar concern with what we do and how we know—and who this impacts—is essential in tandem with discussions of what will be newly possible with the expansion of big data.

Proximity to Change

Most archaeological fieldwork is seasonal, with teams convening on an annual basis to excavate for a few weeks or months. I excavated, for example, in both Jordan and Turkey summer after summer for years. To me, these were hot places; the hills surrounding Wadi Musa in Jordan were beige, dusty, and scrubby while it was always sunflower season at Çatalhöyük.

I moved to Jordan, though, in 2014 for 15 months of sustained ethnographic fieldwork. During that time, Petra flooded. When the temperatures dropped, its hills became covered in pristine white snow and ice, and after the ice sheet melted, Petra bloomed. Petals, pistils, and stamens emerged from plants that I had only seen before as drooped and desiccated carcasses gradually being trampled under donkey’s hooves throughout the site. I knew intellectually, of course, that Petra went through seasonal transformations but seeing it, shivering through it, was a different way of knowing the place than surveying and sifting it.

A multi-seasonal, environmentally-embedded knowledge of the landscapes in which archaeologists work was something that people living at both Çatalhöyük and Petra claimed when they spoke with me. They described seeing and experiencing the sites shifting through seasons, and their knowledge about how to navigate and manage the landscape handed down over generations. Archaeological sites have lives outside of excavation fieldwork seasons—lives that affect the preservation of archaeological remains and the possibility of expanding archaeological knowledge. For instance: the gusting winds, sandstorms, torrential rains, and fluctuating temperatures in Petra have been documented and studied as conservation challenges for the site (al-Saad and Abdel-Halim 2001; Paradise 2002; Wedekind and Ruedrich 2006; Heinrichs 2008; Comer 2012). Much of this research has focused on the effects on the rock-cut facades that make the site famous. The Bedul Bedouin who live and work in Petra see not only how these environmental processes cause the sandstone to weather, crack, and sometimes collapse, but also how the methodological decisions that archaeologists make interact with the seasonal transformations of the site in ways that affect the production of archaeological knowledge.

One specific complaint voiced consistently and widely among the Bedul in Petra is about where archaeologists choose to put their backdirt heaps. Some, when expressing this complaint to me, pointed to the ways in which the ways and locations in which archaeologists pile their backdirt actually functions to limit archaeological knowledge. They named archaeological projects that placed their backfill on top of that from previous projects, mixing them together. “There is a value thing in there,” one café owner said to me about one of the piles of backfill in Petra. “There is stones, and there is grist stones … It’s supposed to be in the place! Not out of the place.” Even worse, though, were the projects which did not account for wind and rain when they determined where to put their backfill piles. “Another thing,” the café owner went on. “They drop dirt somewhere in the river, you know? And the water took everything. It just took everything away.” The complaint made by this café owner and those expressing similar anxieties was that there was more to learn from this excavated soil, that such soil contained artifacts initially missed through haphazard sifting methodologies, inexperienced excavators, or simply different rules about what to keep and what to discard.

Archaeologists would tend to agree, of course. Re-excavation of backfill is practiced around the world, to produce new knowledge both about the archaeological past (e.g., Pearson and Powers 2001; Brown and Edwards 2006) and about taphonomic processes (e.g., Bocek 1992; Boreham et al. 2011), as well as to teach schoolchildren about excavation methods by giving them nonstratigraphic material to dig up (e.g., Ağırdır 2004). In fact, as I was having these conversations around Petra, the Temple of the Winged Lions Cultural Resource Management initiative was actively re-excavating and sifting the backfill from Philip Hammond’s earlier project at the Temple (Tuttle 2013).

In light of the scientific importance of backfill, most projects would not choose to drop their backdirt in a river to be swept away. But the river that the café owner was describing was not a river in the summers when the archaeologists worked. It only becomes a river when wintertime rains descend on the site. Local community members’ uninterrupted and everyday closeness with the archaeological site allows them to recognize the swirling sandy bed as a river, to perceive how the archaeologists’ decision to put their backfill there was essentially flushing antiquities and archaeological knowledge.

Seasonal effects on landscapes are not out of the view of new and advancing technologies that have been part of the big data emergence in archaeology. On the contrary, satellite imagery has proven a useful tool for understanding seasonal rains and flooding, and the effect on archaeological preservation (Conesa et al. 2013; Kouchoukos 2001; Hritz 2014; Ur 2003). Some have noted, of course, the difficulty of detecting minor seasonal streams or creeks that are only visible for a short time, and the challenge in distinguishing contemporary seasonal streams from historical ones (e.g., Evans and Traviglia 2012, 213). Others caution that using satellite imagery in this way should be combined with other, more high-resolution methods like photogrammetry, along with field surveys and “interviews with local people” (Parcak 2007, 65; see also Hesse 2015). The seasonal changes in the archaeological landscape are at least partially detectable through new and expansive modes of documenting sites and regions, but can—or must—be ground-truthed by confirming with the year-round inhabitants of those places.

There is more, however, to the information that people like this café owner shared with me than simply an eye-witness account of this seasonal flooding. His anger, I argue, is itself an orientation toward a particular kind of knowledge-gathering, and a care for the archaeological site. Frustration pulsated in every complaint people in this place made to me about how archaeologists seemed to ignore the changing seasonal conditions and weather patterns in Petra. One day in Petra, I was sitting in a souvenir shop with many older members of the community who were sharing their memories of past excavations in Petra. A younger man named Ahmed was walking past, heard the topic of conversation, and immediately came to sit on a stone under the tent. When he saw an opportunity, he jumped in the conversation, switching to English to make certain I understood:

[This archaeologist,] did he take out and rain damages everything! From twenty years til now. He leave it like this. And the rain comes and … [switches back to Arabic] You know the rain destroys it. Have you seen how the columns have been destroyed?

Ahmed’s impassioned protestation and the café owner’s disgust bring to mind recent discussions of how archaeological work could be led by enchantment (Perry 2019), care (Caraher 2019), and the heart (Lyons, Supernant, and Welch 2019; Supernant and Lyons 2019). Affect, wonder, and connection are proposed as a source of specialized knowledge—a means of directing one’s gaze, determining what questions to ask, and how to approach those questions. Proximity, I argue, comes from the overlap between the multiseasonal knowledge of the site and an emotive concern for the future of one’s home.

Of course, living near an archaeological site does not automatically engender love for the remains themselves—but at least in Petra, there is a general sense among the Bedouin that protecting the archaeological remains is important for the community’s future. This need not be seen as a romanticized adoration of the site, though some do express it this way. One woman born in a cave described her relationship with the site going back generations. “Our great, great grandfathers own it and we protect so much from everything,” she told me. “We protect it more than everybody. We protect it, we love it so much and we protect it.”

For others, however, the interest in preserving artifacts, monuments, and even backfill is driven simply by a shared awareness among members of the Bedouin community that their economic opportunities increase in the wake of new discoveries about Petra. Indeed, 2018 saw an 8-year high in the number of tourists to Petra (Bani Mustafa 2018)—just two years after the widely-publicized discovery of a new monument—“a huge ceremonial platform near the ancient city’s center” (Romey 2016; see also Hetter 2016; National Public Radio 2016; Yuhas 2016). As an employee of the Petra Archaeological Park said to me:

The excavations, when they happen every year, they make new discoveries. And people see them. The tourists in Petra come. There’s new news—they dig new things, I mean, in Petra. When they take things out in the excavations, they make new discoveries in Petra. And it makes for tourism.

Proximity, in terms of care for the site, does not necessarily come from an adoration for the monuments there or an affiliation with the site’s ancient inhabitants. It stems from a perception of shared destiny that those working from afar are unlikely to have. It simultaneously comes from direct experience of the seasonality of the site: the way the rains rush and flow in similar ways annually, the way the wind whips through the wadis from predictable directions and carries the sand away with it, the ways in which archaeological work interplays with the seasons and the environment of the archaeological site. Proximity to the archaeological site affords a directed gaze that is comprehensive in its temporality, but simultaneously selective in its personal sense of urgency.

Multisensory Proximity

Proximity, furthermore, is not just acquired through the year but also through all senses. It is wholly embodied—visually and kinesthetically, olfactorily, and aurally. Archaeological research itself, of course, also engages multiple senses; in fact, there have been numerous calls for archaeologists to take more seriously all of their senses in both their reasoning and the questions they ask about the past (Skeates 2010; Day 2013; Hamilakis 2017; Betts 2017; Simonetti 2018). Excavators not only carefully hone their visual ability to distinguish, for example, between soil layers—but also pay attention to the texture of the deposits they encounter, and the sounds of their tools dragging along them. Touching one’s tongue to an indeterminate artifact to determine whether it is bone, stone, or pottery is such a standard procedure that it has nearly become a rite of passage in the field. Meanwhile, archaeoacoustic researchers have developed tools to reconstruct not just what sites and monuments looked like in the past, but moreover what they sounded like (Mills 2016; Was and Watson 2017; Kolar 2017). There is a literature on the archaeology of scent (Luke, Roosevelt, and Scott 2017; Pawłowska 2014; Bradley 2014). And many who are developing and reflecting on new means of publishing archaeological research are focused on how to convey the complex embodied experiences of an archaeological site through multimedia and augmented reality (Opitz 2018; Eve 2012; Vlahakis et al. 2002).

These multisensory approaches consist of tools and rules which can be ported from site to site. If not universal, these skills and strategies are at least generalizable. Archaeology as a science relies on asking similar research questions across sites and regions, using comparable methods, and training experts who can interpret different sets of data. A multisensory attunement is part of all of these aspects. It is a form of portable expertise, which archaeological researchers bring with them to all of the places and assemblages they work on.

Proximate knowledge is differently multisensory. It is rooted in place, and is anything but transportable. Proximity creates ideas about the past that come from an extended—even lifetime—multisensory experience of a specific environment and location.

At Çatalhöyük, such a multisensory experience of the landscape allows those living at Çatalhöyük to offer original hypotheses about the lifestyle in the Neolithic and to convey the feeling of life at that time. Some of the plants, for example, found at Çatalhöyük are still used today for medicinal purposes. One woman I spoke to remembered when the archaeological team first found some particular seeds in the excavation, which they showed to her. She had recognized them immediately, and described how, in her childhood, her grandparents used those plants to create a paste for treating eczema and softening hair, and how the flowers would be made into a medicine for headaches. Another woman talked about how her family would gather clay from a nearby creek to make pottery. She described, too, how they would collect and burn wood to create ash for washing laundry when she was a child. And one man shared his memory of making yogurt and cheese by putting milk inside animal skins, of storing meat inside pottery. He went on: he recalled the sensation of soothing herbal pastes, the color of the clay rubbing against wet clothes, the smell of the milk turning into cheese inside smooth lambskin. The encounters of these local community members with the artifact assemblage stir up memories that electrify every sense.

One woman, when I asked her what she wanted to know about the archaeological findings, shared that she was especially interested in the pottery from the later levels at Çatalhöyük. At her house, she pulled a book from a shelf and started to flick through it. She opened it before me to a two-page spread of photographs of different pots found at Kültepe, a tell site about 300 km from Çatalhöyük. She pointed to one and told me that her mother-in-law used to make vessels like that one, or another, or another one on the next page. “We were still cooking in pottery like that when I got married,” she recalled wistfully. “Now that we are using metal it doesn’t taste as good. The clay tasted better.” She stopped talking as if imagining the taste of the meat, slow roasted in an earthen jar over fire. We sat together in the memory for several moments.

This multisensory proximity to the site and the landscape goes beyond a connection to an evocative feeling of pastness. It leads too to archaeological theorizing. Some who live in the village still have houses made of mud brick, and to them it made sense that the Neolithic inhabitants of the site would live in mud brick houses. “Mud brick houses are cooler in the summer and warm in the winter. They breathe,” said Hüseyin Veli Yaşlı, an expert mud brick builder in the village. And beyond the comfort of the building materials, the people I spoke with also had ideas about why the Neolithic inhabitants of Çatalhöyük chose to construct the entrances to the on the roofs. This would prevent wild animals from getting in, they thought. An even more common explanation was that it would prevent water from seeping in under the doors, a problem experienced by contemporary inhabitants of the area living in mudbrick houses.

Knowledge like this comes from living in place, from wrapping oneself in and digesting the features of the local environment. This is different from the archaeological sensibility of seeking innovative and informative ways of using our bodies to take in information about the many places where we work. Archaeologists learn from one another, and how other researchers are developing conclusions about acoustic experiences of the past, or doing viewshed analysis, or working to recreate the smells and tastes of feasts in ancient societies.

Proximate multisensory knowledge is rooted instead in longterm—maybe lifelong—embodied experience of place. It develops at the interfaces between the body and the environment, over time and at home. This kind of knowledge inherently cannot be acquired at a distance, and it resists comparison or combination across locations. Despite this, it is clearly a mode of developing understandings of the pasts of particular places, even if it is difficult to imagine how it might be systematized or massified to be useful for archaeological hypothesis-testing. Proximate knowledge contrasts, therefore, not only with multisensory interpretative approaches in archaeology but also with the expansive view of big data initiatives, and the technical visualizations of new imaging technologies in archaeology. It can only become part of the archaeological record through relationship-building between those living at the site and those visiting it to research it, which is itself a form of proximity.

Proximity to Archaeologists

In some locations, archaeologists themselves have been part of a place for a long time. In these cases, local inhabitants have experienced proximity and developed concomitant knowledge not just about the physical place but also about archaeologists themselves. This can be helpful especially in cases where the excavation process was not thoroughly documented, or is not immediately evident, or if the site has been polished and presented as if its questions have been answered. Oftentimes there are local community members who worked on previous projects or at least observed the work, who can open the “black box” of the excavation (Latour 1987; Leighton 2015).

This is very much the case in Petra. Speaking with local community members in Petra also points to a meta-analysis of the methodological differences between archaeological projects in the site over the course of the 20th century. Dachlalla Quban al-Faqir, who has worked as a foreman on archaeological projects since the 1970’s (on nearly every American project run in Petra and numerous Jordanian ones) impressed upon me:

Allison, every doctor is different from the others. Every one has their system, I mean. Each one of them has their work. [Philip] Hammond had his system, the others had their systems, each one has another system. A different one.

I heard from him, and others, how archaeologists working in Petra dug differently, documented differently, photographed differently. How they managed workers differently, treated students differently. They chose which artifacts to keep and discard on different criteria, they conducted their pottery analyses differently. They created, in the end, different archaeological records. Those idiosyncrasies which have long prevented the creation of a uniform and comparable global archaeological record are perceived and preserved in the memories of local community members who have lived at the site as various seasonal projects have rotated through.

Those who live at the archaeological sites where archaeologists work do not merely observe archaeological work from afar. Sometimes, friendships and mutual trust have emerged between seasonal research teams and locally-hired site workers. These warm relationships have enabled a two-way exchange of information. This was true for Ismail Yaşlı, whose story opened this piece. As he became closer with archaeologists at Çatalhöyük, like Roger Matthews, they shared information with him about the assemblage there. And in turn, he shared information about the surrounding landscape with the people with whom he felt an affinity. In other words, only by embracing intimacy and proximity with local community members do archaeologists gain a glimpse into the knowledge characterized by proximity itself.

Salem, a Bedouin in Petra, made explicit this connection between friendship and expanding archaeological knowledge:

So this is the reason, I mean, for a relationship with the foreigners who come here to work, for the full range of investigations, I mean, friendship to be present. So this is in the interest of the whole area. They are interested in finding potential sites. So they should talk to the people nearest to them. Because they come and they go. Eh? So maybe they want to talk to the people who live near them, for example … They should care about the people living here because they’ve protected the city. Which is why they find it so beautiful today.

Site workers from Çatalhöyük expressed similar sentiments. They shared their memories of working with the early teams, and told stories of sharing their ideas about the past with Turkish research team members and foreign excavators who spoke Turkish. One man who had worked on the project in the 1990’s recalled fondly that in the beginning, “there was a nice relationship between the archaeologists, who were like students, and the people in the village, who were like teachers.” Another man who had participated in the research project during the early 2000’s remembered becoming close friends with the specialists in the ceramics laboratory at Çatalhöyük. “In my free time,” he told me, “I would go and help them. They found out I had some skill in identifying mends so I would help them.” He helped the conservation team, as well, with preserving the cracked and falling plaster on the walls of the houses. Again and again, site workers shared memories of collaborating with and sharing information with foreign members of the Çatalhöyük team—stating explicitly their desire to work hard and share ideas with those members whom they had spent time talking, laughing, joking with.

When community members did not feel such camaraderie with the excavators, however, collaborative relationships and sharing of expertise did not always happen. “Some excavators keep us at a distance,” one longtime site worker told me. Another contrasted his work in the early years, characterized by mutual respect with the archaeological team, with the strict hierarchy and rigid treatment he experienced in later years. “I want to bash them,” he told me. Another woman expressed a similar anger about changes she had observed over the years in the relationships between excavators and local community members at Çatalhöyük. “Because of this, the workers sometimes damage the mud bricks,” she said, not making it clear whether this was simply out of miscommunication or out of intention.

There is a relationship between how proximate knowledge develops and how it is shared. Admittedly, it is a simple and perhaps prosaic recognition that people speak more freely with their friends. But more significantly, the content and the character of proximate knowledge requires closeness to communicate these particular ways of knowing. If proximity requires emotive, embodied experience in place, and the development of feelings of comfort and, so too does the exchange of proximate knowledge. Proximate knowledge is not visible scientific data that can be observed and measured, or easily recorded. The sharing of proximate knowledge requires developing relationships centering on care and attachment, interpersonal feelings that mirror the affect enabling the emergence of place-based proximate knowledge. The closeness that creates and characterizes proximate knowledge extends from its content to its exchange, and may be difficult or even undesirable to replicate in digitized ways. In the following, concluding section, I assess the possibilities and risks of seeking to integrate big data approaches in archaeology with proximate knowledge.

Proximity and Big Data

The foregoing sections characterize proximity in two specific places, chosen not for comparison but to flesh out some areas of particular expertise that proximity allows. There are certainly more, not just from the communities at Petra and Çatalhöyük, but from other communities who live in, on, and near archaeological sites. The many specific expressions of proximity all share in common the rooting in place, the spending deep and meaningful time, the drawing together of people—in fact because of this intimacy, proximity takes on different attributes in different localities. With this in mind, there are two essential questions to ask and investigate in light of emergent big data initiatives in archaeology: whether proximate knowledge and big data can be integrated, and whether they should.

The issue of how (and whether) to accommodate highly location-specific through archaeological recording strategies has been a debate in archaeological circles for centuries. The first recording strategies in archaeology were idiosyncratic, personal, and emotional, consisting of letters and diaries written from the field by elite explorers for their friends and fellow learned society members back home (Hodder 1989; Lucas 2018; Mickel 2015; Bradley 2006). These writing styles allowed their writers to capture anything they observed that was out of the ordinary or context-dependent, but almost immediately the problem of how to compare findings across sites was apparent. Excavators began keeping notebooks with more structure, making similar measurements and drawing comparable plans in the different places where they worked. With the advent of archaeology as a scientific discipline and as a commercial enterprise—both of which required a standard methodology—archaeologists started creating pro forma for excavations (Hodder 1989; Lucas 2001 2012; Roskams 2001; Pavel 2010). These standardized forms ensure that the same data is documented across stratigraphic units at least within a single site. The tradeoff, however, was that individual excavators had less freedom to document their particular perceptions of and relationships with the archaeological data—though some research projects have worked to resolve this by crafting their own custom pro forma (Pavel 2010).

The tension between freedom and flexibility in archaeological recording versus standardization and comparability only heightened as pro forma matured from printed sheets to manually entered databases to “paperless” tablets in the field. Databases from individual sites filled and swelled, and as they did, new kinds of analyses and queries became possible. With sufficiently standardized structures, datasets across archaeological sites could be combined and examined together, opening up for the first time at least the theoretical possibility of connecting archaeological datasets from around the entire world.

But those involved in building digital tools for recording, archiving, and publication, have continued to grapple with the implications of overly standardizing archaeological data recording and preservation (Baines and Brophy 2006; Dunn 2011; Hester, Shafer, and Feder 2009; Kansa and Kansa 2011; Pavel 2010; Watrall 2011; Wendrich 2011), and many digital platforms for archaeological documentation and archiving were designed with flexibility in mind. The website of the Interactive Archaeological Knowledge System (iAKS), a database platform developed at Michigan State University, states on its website that it is “completely customizable to the needs of individual users and projects” (Matrix). Open Context, another web-based data publishing tool, can accommodate metric data, narrative text, and other media (Kansa and Kansa 2011). Users can also export data in many different filetypes and computing languages, allowing them to combine Open Context records with other programs and information (Kansa 2010). Platforms for electronic publication in recent years exhibit the same tendency toward flexibility and accommodation of a range of data, by linking datasets together with multimedia, scholarly publications and some even pulling in content from grey literature (Richards 2006; Richards et al. 2011; Plog and Most 2006; Kansa and Kansa 2011). These technologies mediate between the need for systematization and the need to capture the unusual and unexpected by being expansive—not just in terms of geography but in terms of the forms of information brought into view.

There is also an emphasis on expansion in the sense of who can be involved in big data collection and analysis (Dunn 2011; Morgan and Eve 2012; Wendrich 2011). Digital humanists beyond archaeology have argued that web-based platforms create paths for diverse communities of interlocutors to add to the body of recorded information about archaeological evidence, thereby blurring the boundaries between authors and readers, redistributing power across relationships that are more densely networked than ever before. George Landow, for instance, has called this “the empire writing back” (2006, 7). Indeed, several archaeological projects have started to provide different levels of participatory power to nonspecialist interlocutors, with varying degrees of success (Richardson 2013). In both Open Context and BoneCommons, users may apply ‘tags’ to data objects which can be made public, which create new relationships and terminology shared between those navigating these databases (Kansa and Deblauwe 2011; Kansa and Kansa 2011). The Prescot Street project in Aldgate utilized a blogging system, videos, and data publication and invited members of the public to offer different interpretations to those the archaeologists were presenting along the way (Morgan and Eve 2012). The Reciprocal Research Network (RRN) at the Museum of Anthropology in British Columbia has enjoyed a great deal of engagement in this regard, perhaps because they primarily seek to include and incorporate the expertise of indigenous communities about objects created within those communities (Boast and Biehl 2011). The expansiveness of “big” data is geographic, it is about format and data type, it is about the sorts of questions archaeologists can ask of our data, and it is also about access. Indeed, Kitchin (2014) has called big data “huge in volume … exhaustive in scope … [and] flexible, holding the traits of extensionality (can add new fields easily) and scaleability (can expand in size rapidly).”

In light of these multiple forms of expansiveness, it is certainly to imagine possibilities for how proximity might be brought under the rubric of big data. Stories conveying proximity could be written in text or in Tweets, recorded in audio or video, evoked in photographs or art, or through another form entirely, which could all conceivably be brought into big databases. It is even conceivable that those with proximate knowledge could contribute these perspectives themselves, at least in the locations described here. Others have rightly raised the issue that Internet access might prevent some groups of people from being included in digital data collection and scientific dialogues (Richardson 2013; McDavid 2002). But in Jordan, nearly every dukan, or minimart, sells cards for topping up one’s cell phone plan, where 1 GB of data usually costs around $2. And at Çatalhöyük, when I asked one interviewee if he had any questions about the site, he politely declined and said, “We have the Internet!” Indeed, by the end of 2018, 69.3% of the world’s population had active cell phone plans with data speeds over 256 KB/s. This increase in usership represented an uptick of 41.9 percentage points from only 5 years prior (ITU 2019).

The technological affordances of big data therefore create the possibility for such initiatives to open windows, at least, into some expressions of proximate knowledge—or maybe even doors for local community members to contribute glimpses of these perspectives themselves. Even if this is possible, though, it may not be desirable. Incorporating or just simply inviting local understandings of sites into big data repositories may be at odds with expanding equity in archaeological knowledge production.

Whether or not it is justified, big data initiatives give the impression of being ever-expanding, almost totalizing, rather than designed to answer particular research questions (Kitchin 2014). By contrast, the strength of proximity is not only in its partiality, but in its highly specific situated character—the fact that it develops out of the interaction between human bodies in material landscapes at particular moments. Proximity exemplifies the virtues of Haraway’s “situated knowledges,” for whom “only partial perspective promises objective vision” (1998, 583). For proximate knowledges to be enrolled in big data initiatives, there is some amount of subversion of the strength of proximity as a particular, situated form of knowledge that is viable and valid because of its partiality.

Beyond the epistemological consequences, there is also the question of what is lost by deprioritizing the slow, interpersonal work of building proximity between archaeological researchers and the inhabitants of sites. Can archaeologists afford to challenge community members’ claims to unique intimate knowledge of archaeological sites, or to zoom out and perform expansive analyses from afar in a context where:

“If the local community are—were against you [the archaeologist], and you don’t build a good relationship with them, they will damage the site. But if you build a good relationship, they will feel that this is their site. And they will protect it. They will at least take care for it.” –Mahmoud, a member of the Bedouin community in Petra.

The work of relationship-building does not just serve the purpose of allowing the exchange of information between archaeological research teams and those who live in the places where we work. It also engenders shared priorities, by encouraging local community members to protect sites and by suggesting to the research team what questions and methodologies might be most welcome to the community where they are working.

Community members in many contexts have participated in generating new archaeological data. Archaeologists in some contexts, like the Amazon, have involved local farmers in site documentation and ecological survey (Gomes 2006). Other projects have centered on community mapping (e.g., Larrain and McCall 2019; McAnany and Rowe 2015). And some have sought to engage local site residents’ proximity—like O’Grady, Luke, Mokrišová, and Roosevelt (2018) who drew on “local understanding of biodiversity and climate … to document seasonal weather impacts on mudbrick.” In their project, local residents of the Gediz Valley in Turkey documented the status of mudbrick degradation through a yearlong weather cycle. There are, therefore, possibilities for collaborative approaches to data gathering and analysis that are guided by prioritizing proximity as a situated knowledge. All of these models, though, rely on relationship-building in person and over time—and what worked in one of these contexts may not be applicable in any other.

To even know what is appropriate in a given context, what proximity looks like in a given location and whether or how local residents may want to share it, archaeological researchers need to get close. In fact, closeness needs to be a starting point for proximity to be a priority. This is different from consulting with communities as a means of ground-truthing hypotheses developed through big data analysis, or the engagement of communities online—something often discussed as a means of making community engagement as expansive as big data collection (Beck 2012; Milek 2018; Richardson 2013; Waterton 2010). Neither of these approaches center on the place-basis and partiality that characterize proximity. They do not necessitate the temporal and emotional investment in relationship-building that has enabled exchange of proximate knowledge in the past.

Proximity is not just a source of knowledge from which archaeologists can learn and benefit. It is an orientation toward both place and people, with particular consequences for archaeological knowledge production and for justice. There is room for crossover between proximate ways of knowing and big data initiatives—but only with a full recognition of the importance of proximity as both a perspective and a practice.

Acknowledgments

The research described here was funded by Fulbright, the American Schools of Oriental Research, the Biblical Archaeology Society, the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University, and the Stanford Archaeology Center. I am grateful to all of those living at Petra and Çatalhöyük who agreed to be a part of this research, who invited me into their homes and their lives, particularly those named and quoted in this text. I would like to thank as well the editors of this special issue, J. Andrew Dufton and Parker VanValkenburgh, for organizing the SAA session that led to the issue, for their editorial vision, and for their feedback on earlier drafts of the manuscript. Their critiques, together with those of JFA editor Christina Luke, and anonymous reviewers greatly improved the text. Any gaps or shortcomings, of course, remain my own.

Disclosure Statement

The authors declare no potential conflict of interest.

Notes on Contributor

Allison Mickel (Ph.D. 2016, Stanford University) is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Lehigh University, and a core faculty member in both Global Studies and the Center for Global Islamic Studies. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Stanford University in 2016 and her B.A. from The College of William and Mary in 2011. Her research focuses on how local communities have impacted and been affected by the long history of archaeological work in the Middle East. By interviewing current and former site workers employed on archaeological projects, and utilizing statistical and visual methods like social network analysis, Allison Mickel maps, measures, illustrates, transcribes, outlines, and stipples the roles that local community members play in the processes of archaeological knowledge production. She has excavated in Jordan, Turkey, Kenya, and the United States, and is now undertaking an ethnographic project centering on two new private companies in Jordan advocating for the recognition of local expertise and fair labor conditions on archaeological excavations.

ORCID

Allison Mickel http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6789-2638