the usual apologies for cross-posting
does anyone have any thoughts about the workability/practicality of "reflexive archaeology"?
hodder wrote about it in a couple of articles in "antiquity" and then in "the archaeological process" and "towards relexive method in archaeology," but i found his descriptions/explanations more or less the same as what they write for the museum of london context sheets, for example, where you are supposed to explain the reasons for your interpretations, and discuss how confident you are with them, etc. -
so i don't think they're anything qualitatively, revolutionarily new...
i've just read an article by adrian chadwick (archaeological dialogues 10 [1]) where - among other things - he laments the fact that post-processualism seems to have infiltrated the armchairs but not fieldwork -
among other things i think this may be true in UK & parts of US academia, but a lot of the rest of the world hasn't even caught on to the processualist agenda, let alone progressed to post-pro...
so: is anyone doing (or even thinking about) post-pro/reflexive fieldwork? how about worrying about "underming existing hierarchies of power within commercial archaeology"? an "alienated division of labour"?
do we see excavation work as "an essentially sensual, subjective experience"? and if so, how do we get more financing for our "embodied, sensual encounters"...?
what bugs me is that adrian (& hodder, and a few others) insist on throwing out comments along the lines of "excavators must be treated as well-educated and/or experienced and multi-skilled specialists, and they must be paid and led accordingly well" without ever quite explaining how we can go about doing this...
& i don't see how we can explain to developers that we need more money for our "embodied, sensual encounters"...
any thoughts/comments (aside from complaints about this message being too long)?