Archaeological Interpretation: The Rhetorical Shaping of Public Memory

Introduction

The archaeological process is destructive by nature – one can never excavate the same context again. As such, the documentation of archaeological excavation and the associated texts become the primary record to contextualize the material. Archaeology’s role in interpreting sites and material culture often does not consider the burden of responsibility to shape public memory of the context destroyed through excavation. The audience of archaeological documentation is often conceived as a narrow scope of scholarly peers. However, these texts by archaeologists reverberate through various public spheres, ultimately playing a major role in shaping public memory. Understanding the nature of publics and public memory can help archaeology, as a discipline, exert more agency over the way archaeological work is communicated and interpreted by public discourse over time.

Theories from the fields of rhetoric and composition studies offer productive frameworks to consider the role and responsibility of archaeologists in the earliest rhetorical shaping of public memory. Scholarship on publics, audience, and the rhetorical process connecting scientific work with the public sphere applies to understanding the rhetorical process archaeologists’ texts undergo as they circulate through various filters of stakeholders, journalists, or other cultural heritage specialists who interface directly with the public at museums or other public spaces. These interdisciplinary lenses provide productive new views on the issues of communicating archaeology by considering how these texts circulate after publication.

This chapter situates public memory studies in the disciplines of rhetoric and composition, establishing the application of these perspectives to the field of archaeology. While work has been published connecting rhetorical studies of public memory to the repositories of associated archaeological material at museums and monuments (Dickinson et al., 2010; Greer & Grobman, 2015; Simpson, 2006), this chapter extends this work to connect the responsibility of shaping public memory directly to archaeological excavation, the inception of the material-cultural process. Archaeologists’ interpretations serve as the urtexts upon which later interpretations are built. Thus, this opens great potential for further work to address contextualizing how archaeological field interpretation interfaces with public memory.

Defining the complexity and implications of the term “public,” as it refers to both the rhetorical analysis of intended audiences for archaeological documentation and the concepts of public memory (Warner, 2014; Houdek & Phillips, 2017), will establish lexical framework to explore the connections between texts and publics. The concept of the public, or many publics, are artificial constructs in a constant state of flux. Though these constructs are necessary to create an audience identity to direct information toward, there are tensions at the interface of solidified facts and a fluid concepts of public. Foundational definitions of public and public memory (Bruner, 2010; Phillips, 2010; Warner, 2014) facilitate exploration of the ethical roles archaeologists must consider as they contextualize their scientific work within the public spheres in the digital age. Further, rhetorical processes of how scientific research enters and circulates through networks will be explored in case studies of documents created and distributed during archaeological excavations (Fahnestock, 1986; Edbauer, 2010; Spinuzzi, 2008).