Writing Wednesday: In Praise of Fragments

This past week, I’ve been trying to find my writing groove again and make progress on a conference paper that I’m giving next Friday in Washington, DC. The paper is titled: “Slow and Punk Archaeology Revisited: In Praise of Fragments.” I wrote something of the introduction a week or so ago. My paper is still very much a work in progress, but I think I’m managing to bring together what I’m trying to say in a more productive (rather than merely descriptive) way: In my earlier work, I argued for breaking down the barriers between fieldwork, lab work, writing, and publishing in archaeology arguing that these are all part of the knowledge making process. The deliberate practice of fragmenting archaeological sites in the field by recording them as strata, transects, grid squares, and contexts offers efficiency in exchange for more tedious, detailed, and recursive approaches that might offer a way to capture experience of site or moving through a landscape (Witmore). Elsewhere I have…