Hello and welcome to another Anarchist 
Research Group video. today we're
speaking to Colleen Morgan, lecturer in
digital archaeology and heritage at the
University of York. Don't forget to
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My name is Colleen Morgan I am a lecturer
in digital archaeology and heritage at
the University of New York Department of
archaeology and my work is primarily
within what's called digital
archaeology but I've become very
interested in anarchist theory and
anarchist approaches to archaeology in the past.
Archaeology has long been the
study of material culture and
trying to derive understanding of the
past from material culture. Increasingly
people have been using it today to
understand contemporary archaeology and
contemporary problems within the world.
There are several examples around the
world including people using archaeology
on plastics. I with my colleague Sarah
Perry, we excavated a hard drive and so
trying to understand the materiality of
the hard drive and what that can tell us
about the manufacturing process and our
understanding of space and place within
a digital and physical object.
So archaeology brings together material
culture, which is what you think of
generally when you think of a
archaeology as artifacts and pottery and
things like that but we also look at
sites more generally so that would be
buildings and we also look at landscapes
as well and sometimes we don't actually
excavate we look and try to identify
archaeological remains from the
landscape. So that's kind of a broad view
of what archaeology is and what it can
do but there are many examples of
archaeology being used to try to uncover
histories and stories more, that we
wouldn't understand from written history
because most of history is has not been
written down, and so I'm particularly
interested in those bits that don't
necessarily have
a written component to it but that you
are able to discern from the material record.
So most recently I was excavating
in Qatar and this was a project called
The Origins of Doha and Qatar Project,
with Professor Robert Carter and this
was excavating a series of pearling
villages all up and down the coast of
Qatar I was very interested in how
people managed to live in what we
would consider a fairly marginal way of
living: there was very little fresh water
and a lot of the food was quite limited
as well. So trying to understand how
people were able to survive and even
thrive in these coastal communities was
a really important part of our research
but it was also really interesting
because a lot of these communities have
very clear connections to the present
day and so we were able to incorporate
oral histories and some documentary
evidence to better understand the past
in that case.
I became interested in anarchism and anarchism in archeology
specifically through a moment I believe
in sitting in my lounge with James
Flexner who is a close colleague of mine
and who explained to me that he believed
that all archaeologists are anarchists
and I was not I didn't know what he was
talking about I was shocked but I've
increasingly come around to the belief
that there are many anarchic aspects to
archaeology and that anarchism can be a
really really effective tool to
understand societies in the past and
it's a very different lens to actually
understanding these societies because
traditionally we think about in
archaeology as change as junctures
disjuncture we have some very
evolutionary patterns of thinking about
societies as far as you evolve to become
a state society but many societies
resisted this and
so seeing those that resistance seeing
those erasures has become really
important I believe in archeology. To my
mind within archeology and there are
many people that are much more versed in
this and I am that it really came to be
out of several different genres of
archaeological thinking notably there's
Carole Crumley's work on heterarchies
and some of that fed into trying to
understand and use some of the anarchist
literature. I think that David Graeber
was a really great bridge for a lot of
archaeologists and he was beginning to
tell us stories that we didn't
necessarily always agree with but did
have some resonance as far as
understanding debt and I think we also
pulled some from the anarchist
anthropologists, Clastres and what
life what not but really within
archaeology it's a lot of the
publication's came really post 2012 and
then there was an Emerin seminar which
I sadly wasn't able to go to because I
had a child but was really productive in
forming the Black Trowel Collective
who have put out a manifesto that's
really fantastic about the utility and
the hope and the generative qualities of
anarchist thought in archaeology.
I think more generally within
archaeology we see a lot of work within
three genres. We see people trying to
use anarchist theory to better
understand pasts and 
resistance and past societies and
structure and power and how that worked,
but also you see it quite a bit in
contemporary archaeology where people are
doing archaeology's of again of current
political movements of resistance and
there's also finally in using
archaeology as a prefigurative tool, so
trying to bring people together through
archaeology to prefigure an idea about
how we want to live and work together in
the future. I co-authored a paper about
how archaeology could be understood as
anarcho-syndicalism and that be used as
again a prefigurative device within
archaeology in 2018 with Daniel Eddisford
and we looked at the history of the what
is now the Museum of London Archaeology
and what was then the Department of
Urban Archaeology and we found such a
rich and interesting archive. We found
that they were creating zines and they
were marching together and there's a lot
more political action within archaeology
at that time and we found whereas
academic archaeology was very highly
structured as Mortimer Wheeler a famous
archeologist says it was run like a
military campaign these commercial
archaeologists were often getting
together and trying to understand and
form a collective understanding of the
past
and Daniel Eddisford and I looked at a
very large what's called Harris matrix
within archeology and that's how we
document what we find on site and make
it legible to others and
how we show the positioning of different
things that we find on site and so we
found within it this remarkable document
that showed erasures, that showed
white outs, that showed people changing
their minds and we could tell it was the
word many many hands and so to me that
was very evocative, it showed this collective knowledge
generation and the really great thing
was that we when we turned over we found
a flyer for political action on the back
as well and so it was in this way that
we were able to discern within a
commercial archaeology an ethic of care
and how it is played out through health
and safety especially on site and how
people use while is commonly derided by
many sectors they really use it to try
to take care of each other within a very
dangerous atmosphere but also I can see
that the outputs of these publications
are again very different there was
Hobley's Heroes, which was a zine that
came out and it's archived online that
had comics, it had things about the
archaeology, it had gossip, and it was
just this very freeform very interesting
form of publication that we aren't
really able to see even with the online
world. I found it really inspirational
and I hope to carry that forward in some
of my work. So it was really interesting
because anarchism in archaeology is a
very broad church you find people doing
projects all over many different
continents you find those forms work
down in the American Southwest and you
find a Bill Angelbeck he works up
in the Pacific Northwest so those are
both in America or James Flexner's work
down in the South Pacific and he looks
at more colonial encounters, and so
you're really seeing people that are
looking at it all the way really from
I believe the Bronze Age into
almost the modern day, well I would say
the modern day because you do have
archaeologists
looking at collections from utopian
communities and resistance and things like that.
I don't think I can really
speak for all of the anarchist
archaeologists and I certainly can't
necessarily speak for the Black Trowel
Collective and some of their manifesto. I
think though that you can draw a lot of
threads together out of what anarchist
thought within archaeology can do and
should do. I think that like I said
earlier it was looking at prehistoric
and historic societies to better
understand structure or lack of
structure, egalitarianism. I think it
is looking at the material culture of
current protest cultures as I said and I
also believe that it is trying to bring
together archaeologies of therapy
therapy to foment societies and make
places where we want to live and work
again. When I talk about prefiguration in
archaeology I'm really talking about the
things that make archaeology meaningful
to me
not necessarily to all archaeologists
but I find that when you come together
and you make things together and this
can be not only the craft of excavation,
that can also be making interpretations
a lot of our archaeologists do
experimental archaeology so they come
together they go outside and they burn
things together, but really coming
together and towards a common goal,
working together in a very egalitarian
way and bringing in people that don't
necessarily have as much experience as
you do but also really valuing them
really trying to upskill them. But I
think that folds really easily into
ideas about authority within archeology.
We've been struggling a lot with
authority within archeology for many
reasons and many prescribe a move away
from authority and into what some people
called multi-locality and so trying to
draw together more interpretations and
more people into creating these
archaeological interpretations, and I
think there's some really interesting
things that can come from that but it
really comes into the ideas of natural
authority and artificial authority so
these more generally are artificial
authority is say a politician or a an
academic who has some power that is not
necessarily, that's gained through a
structure versus a natural authority
which comes from intensive and repeated
experience and I think this is
particularly pertinent to archaeology
because they often the example used for
natural authority is that of a shoemaker
right so you want a very experienced
shoemaker to make your shoes and so you
want to very experienced archaeologists
to perform your excavation but that
doesn't mean that you're necessarily
taking authority away from other people
other people can come in and they might
have authority in different ways they
might be a master videographer they
might have an amazing oral history of
what is there and there's no necessary
barriers necessarily to becoming an
skilled within archaeology but I think
it's really important to recognize that
there is a natural authority within the
craft of archaeology. I think that
anarchism can be really useful in
critiquing a lot of the really statist
models and so understanding complexity
as hierarchy as greater structuration
versus
a network and so a network understanding
of people and things together. I think
that anarchist theory has been really
well used by many archaeologists already
so again you have those four that is
working in the American Southwest
in New Mexico and really trying to
understand culture and the perpetuation
of culture when really in archeology
we looked for rupture and we look for
change and so I think that anarchist
theory can really presence those absence
absences and make them relevant and make
them very interesting and make them
something to look for. Similar to that I
believe that Wengrow and Graeber's
article on California and how some of
writ large indigenous Californians saw
themselves in arguably contrast to
peoples of the Pacific north, northwest
were very much into potlatch and they
had other things like slavery and
so they constructed themselves in
opposition to that in a fairly aesthetic
way. This is their research and so I'm
probably mischaracterizing it, but I do
want to highlight that research because
it is really important in showing how
useful anarchist theory can be to
archeology. I think there's a lot of
really exciting research coming up right
now through ideas about radicalism and
in archeology. Caitlin Kitchener's work
on Peterloo and gender is fantastic.
Kirsty Ryder is also very interested in
what the material culture of the
suffrage could possibly mean and how
people used it to perform the radicalism
and I also believe that Iida Käyhkö's
work in trying to understand communities
Kurdish communities in London and the
materiality and their ways of banding
together is just incredibly vital and
incredibly important to highlight
