Most of us developed our youthful fascination for the field through
popular archaeological books by a few talented writers. I still have
my copy of the "Seven Caves" and "The Greek Stones Speak." As we
grew, we found more technical books and developed specialist
interests, but we never encountered the "real" stuff until college or
graduate school.
By "real" stuff, I mean those boring site reports and technical
analyses written by nearsighted bipedants for academic audiences.
The audience for the technical report is a captive audience; it is
their job to read this crap, and so it doesn't need to be well
presented. I'd hate to be a reviewer for a state office, evaluating
endless Phase I survey reports of sites where nothing was found. Hey,
it pays.
There is, however, a vast middle ground, where good writing should be
encouraged. Our audience commonly is interpreted as being divided
into two parts: the technical and the "popular" readers. Responding
to this interpretation, we produce dry monographs for the one
audience, and dumbed-down comic books for the other. The model
readers are typically identified as boring eggheads on one extreme,
and bored housewives who would rather be reading Danielle Steele
bodice-rippers.
In between are most of the public. Out there is a vast educated
population. They may not be specialists in our field, but they are
accustomed to reading something more complicated than a cereal box.
Of these people, there are many who are interested in genealogy,
local history, or some collecting specialty like beer cans or
military hardware that probably is covered in the archaeological
literature. These people should be our audience for the better
archaeological writing. It is to this audience that Noel Hume wrote
his books; these people subscribe to National Geographic, Scientific
American, and Natural History.
It is possible to write, illustrate, and publis, a fully acceptable
technical report that will appeal to the upper level of general
readers. Unfortunately there have been too few such reports, relative
to the vast number of poorly written and poorly presented reports
that clog our libraries, unnoticed for the most part.
Talented writers, such as Mortimer Wheeler, J. C. Harrington, Jim
Deetz, and Ivor Noel Hume, can turn the sow's ear of archaeology into
the silk purse of readable history without sacrificing academic
integrity. The rest of us should take to heart the example of such
individuals and make our work readily accessible to a public that
should be supporting us when we need public support.
In my own educational career, I can point to early readings of books
by Ralph Linton, George Mylonas, and Geoffrey Bibby, that aroused my
youthful interest in regional or specialist archaeology, even though
I never specialized in those fields. I didn't even know what an
archaeological specialty was, until I read such authors who brought
their specialties to life.
I have absolutely no qualms about including local history, catsup
recipes, genealogy, and tinsmithing techniques in my technical
reports, if it helps me get across the idea of what we are finding.
Illustration is cheap, so let's include lots of artifact pictures and
fieldwork pictures, even pictures of the mayor visiting the site. If
the report is well written and technically correct, it will not be
destroyed by a few embellishments that might make it readable and
interesting for the educated general public.
Public archaeological writing is, or should be, written to different
audiences at different levels of education, interest, and devotion.
While we should never compromise quality, we should always aim for
the widest possible audience, which might mean that a whole bunch of
archaeologists need to take writing courses.
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