Weekly
Chat from About Archaeology
Moderated by Pat Garrow and K. Kris Hirst
Transcript: April 15, 2001: Speaker Rosemary Joyce
Note:This transcript has been slightly edited for readability.
Information about Dr. Joyce's work has been stored here.
Printer-Friendly Chat Transcript
| Pat Garrow |
Our guest for this evening is Rosemary Joyce,
specialist in Mesoamerican Archaeology and contributor to the Sister Stories project |
| Pat Garrow |
Welcome to Articulations Rosemary |
| Rosemary Joyce |
Thank you |
| Pat Garrow |
can you tell us a little about yourself? where
are you from and where do you live now? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
I grew up in Buffalo NY, and went to Cornell as
an undergrad then headed to Illinois for grad school. Since 1994 I have been living in the
Bay Area in California |
| Pat Garrow |
how did you first become interested in
archaeology? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
In Buffalo, the local science museum had Saturday
classes and natural history field trips, and I was able to take part in a dig. |
| Pat Garrow |
did that include hands on experience with
archaeology? |
| Pat Garrow |
the dig is normally what does it. what was the
first site you worked on? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
The dig I worked on was a nineteenth century
historic house |
| Rosemary Joyce |
The dig was sponsored by a local German
historical society and was very community rooted and I was able to work all winter on the
processing of the material, which really got me hooked |
| Rosemary Joyce |
The experience reinforced my fascination with
archaeology that started when I was 7 and read about Schliemann’s quest for Troy |
| Pat Garrow |
would that be the book The Gold of Troy by
chance? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
Actually, the book that got me hooked was
"The Aeneid for Boys and Girls" |
| Rosemary Joyce |
my father read Latin and Greek and wanted me to
as well |
| Pat Garrow |
a little more high brow than the Schliemann book
that hooked me at around 12 years old |
| IreneH |
How old were you then? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
The first dig I was on, I was 14 or 15 |
| Pat Garrow |
there is so much untapped interest in
archaeology. we should have a much larger constituency than we have |
| Kris Hirst |
do you think that's where (at least partly) your
interest in public archaeology comes from? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
I think because I worked on archaeology in a
museum and community setting I always thought of it as public. |
| Rosemary Joyce |
Originally, I intended only to work in museums--
then in grad school I found out I love to teach. |
| Pat Garrow |
how did you become interested in the archaeology
of Honduras? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
About Honduras: when I was an undergrad at
Cornell, I still was intending to do historical and even went to Washington on a dig at
Fort Walla Walla. Then I got an opportunity to be on a field school in Honduras, and I
fell in love with the country. |
| IreneH |
Do you teach now? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
(Yes, Irene, I teach at Berkeley-- and have
taught now for 16 years...) |
| Kris Hirst |
could you talk about your interest in feminist
archaeology? what does "feminist archaeology" mean to you and ... well, let's
start there |
| Rosemary Joyce |
Feminist archaeology for me means doing an
archaeology that attempts to people the past and that questions assumptions about men and
women in the past |
| Rosemary Joyce |
I went to an all-girl high school and was
introduced to feminist writing there, and that has influenced my work |
| IreneH |
Why "feminist" then? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
Feminism as I understand it is a particular form
of political analysis that attempts to understand power inequities between people--
original the sexes--in the present, and so I see it as a way to take archaeology
seriously: the past is one source of other ways of being human |
| Pat Garrow |
are you doing household level investigations that
you then build on? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
Yes, my fieldwork is household archaeology,
although I started in settlement pattern surveys |
| Rosemary Joyce |
The way my interest in feminist issues affects my
household archaeology is that I am as interested in the small-scale and everyday as in the
big issues (monuments, temples, governments, for example) and see the small scale and
everyday as causal |
| Pat Garrow |
I feel that household level inquiry is the way to
go also. The archaeologist as an anthropologist......... |
| Pat Garrow |
hard to understand the big issues without a grasp
of the day-to-day |
| Kris Hirst |
what kinds of things can you learn from the small
scale that go missing in the big-picture, traditional kinds of archaeological research? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
Basically, in household archaeology we have the
potential to see archaeological traces of the creation of social relations, especially
through material exchanges and these same traces are also the building blocks of the
economy. But when you take a top-down approach, you ignore the variation and abstract
regularity-- whereas what I am trying to do is encourage looking at the variation as
itself the evidence of different people in the past, with different interests. |
| IreneH |
Many a historian's sin <grin> |
| Rosemary Joyce |
The large scale homogenizes all that, sees it as
noise, when really it is social life |
| Pat Garrow |
how widely do you look at households Rosemary? Do
you limit yourself to house and immediately surrounding space or do you try to identify
the total landscape associated with the household? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
On my field practice: since I started in
settlement patterns, I always move between scales-- what Ruth Tringham, my colleague here,
advocates as "multiscalar" archaeology. |
| IreneH |
Can you explain "move between scales"?
(I'm not an archaeologist) |
| Pat Garrow |
honorary archaeologist at this point Irene |
| Kris Hirst |
yes, Irene is here to keep us honest |
| IreneH |
<grin> thanks, Pat |
| Rosemary Joyce |
I suggest to my students that we have to be
comparative, or we will never know whether there are differences in a society, and for me
that means working on a series of household locations within a site (the micro-scale and
middle scale) and then working on presumably similar households at several sites (which is
the macroscale of the landscape). So by looking first at where sites are (macro-) then at
variation within a site (middle) and then at variation within a household setting (micro)
we get different information that often is complementary, moving from day to day
activities up to regional assembly |
| Pat Garrow |
so you take a fairly broad view of household? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
Yes, I take a very broad view of household-- as
we have realized in archaeology, we have a dilemma in identifying the household |
| Pat Garrow |
do you try to look as a cross section of society
or do you study larger segments of neighborhoods? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
I take the locale of the day to day and small
scale as the operational definition, and look for connections between and differences
among these locales |
| Rosemary Joyce |
Maybe for Irene (and for me) an example will
make more sense. In my current project, on a buried village dating 1600-900 BC, we are
excavating a series of four different areas identified through systematic test pitting. In
each area, our goal is wide exposure of architecture and documenting the associated
features and artifacts that can be reasonably associated, in order to compare possible
size of the groups within the community. |
| Rosemary Joyce |
We are also comparing sources of obsidian used in
the four groups to see whether there are differences in access to imported goods, along
with the even more rare goods, like jade and carved shell. |
| Rosemary Joyce |
Today, effectively all of my work is excavated
and artifact analysis based, because I work in conjunction with the Honduran Institute of
Anthropology doing mitigation of sites under destruction for development, in an area where
I worked on survey creating a site inventory in the 70s and early 80s. |
| IreneH |
I assume you also look at the more mundane things
such as trash? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
Yes, everything I look at really is trash-- just
some really, really neat trash, because our farmers had a pretty high degree of household
wealth |
| Pat Garrow |
when I started in the Southeast36 years ago all
of the field effort was going into public and/or religious spaces (re mounds) and villages
were not explored. I assume the approach in Mesoamerica has been the same until recently |
| Rosemary Joyce |
I think the approach in Mesoamerica is still
biased towards monumental architecture, and only secondary attention goes to household
work, except in areas like the Ulua Valley, where I work, where the monumental is not so
big or common; that in fact is one of our key research issues. |
| Pat Garrow |
the results of household studies are certainly
much more coherent than what you can get poking around in public spaces |
| Rosemary Joyce |
The households in my area are where everything
interesting is happening-- even craft production; I have a student digging kilns right
now.. |
| IreneH |
Why was household work neglected? Wouldn't that
be an integral part? |
| Pat Garrow |
time. money, interest? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
I don't know about the southeast, but in
Mesoamerica the original thought was that houses were interchangeable units-- the basic
units of economic production. So you didn't really need to excavate them; you already knew
what went on (all the "boring" stuff of everyday life). But in fact as Irene
says, that is the integral part, and where everything is rooted. (which is one of the
reasons I am a feminist |
| Pat Garrow |
I suppose to was hard to get grant money unless
you could insure splashy results |
| Rosemary Joyce |
Then when household archaeologists tried to do
work, we found it was difficult to actually establish-- very challenging methodologies
needed-- to establish what people were doing in households. And as Pat says, the results
are none too splashy, for the most part. |
| Pat Garrow |
how wide is the range of variation you are
finding among households? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
The households I am working on (and my students
and collaborators with me) are interesting because the range of variation can be measured
multiple ways. |
| Rosemary Joyce |
In terms of architectural variation, it is
relatively subtle-- similar size houses, similar techniques (although even perishable
architecture varies in solidity). |
| Rosemary Joyce |
But meanwhile, there is enormous variation in
household inventories-- the obsidian stuff is fun because it shows this well, since there
is obsidian in the nearby hills |
| IreneH |
Is this different from Europe? I'm from Germany
originally, and as far as I remember, "household" was a part of archaeology
there. |
| Rosemary Joyce |
Household archaeology has been strongest in those
areas where there are no distracting temples... Neolithic Europe has been a major area of
development |
| IreneH |
and Roman army camps... |
| Pat Garrow |
how are you tracking the obsidian? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
The obsidian segment of the project is using
non-destructive methods-- X Ray Fluorescence-- to characterize the major elements of
obsidian artifacts, and we are also doing source prospecting, with the help of Steve
Shackley, who specializes in obsidian studies in the US SW. It was a revelation to a
Mesoamericanist to find that obsidian in usable quantities could occur as cobbles and
pebbles in volcanic tuffs, not just in glass flows at volcanic cones. |
| Kris Hirst |
Here's Steve Shackley's website, called Sources
of Archaeological Obsidian in the American Southwest:
http://www.arf.berkeley.edu/main/shackley.html (now shut down)
|
| Rosemary Joyce |
The biggest finding we had was that you got a
completely different image of sources used if you sampled blades (formal tools) or
flakes-- the flakes are coming in from different sources and on what looks like a
household level; blades, which are rarer, come from long distances and perhaps are
centrally imported. |
| Pat Garrow |
are the obsidians distinct enough from each other
for that to work? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
The obsidian in these tuff beds are all like each
other in general (and unlike other obsidians in Mesoamerica) and each local dome has very
different element profiles. |
| Pat Garrow |
interesting. I suspect that finding also holds
true in parts of the Southeast |
| Rosemary Joyce |
We use Exploratory Data Analysis to graph the
elements, and you can see the different clusters in 3 dimensions. I have undergrads
working doing this, which is great experience for them and really helps me learn to
understand the analysis better, since teaching makes me learn |
| Pat Garrow |
Are there villages in your area that were devoted
entirely to stone tool making like you get in other area of Mesoamerica? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
In terms of stone tool specialization by
community, that is actually not common in Mesoamerica-- pretty much limited to sites near
sources of raw materials like Colha near the Belize chert sources, or sites near all the
obsidian major volcanic flows. No one has located similar sites in our region (yet). |
| Pat Garrow |
have only seen one such village in my limited
Mesoamerican reach, and that one was in Belize |
| Kris Hirst |
Hey, I hate to change the subject, but let's go
to Sister Stories; it's really a concrete example, I think, of how the feminists
perspective works in archaeology |
| Rosemary Joyce |
Right you are, Kris-- I love to talk field work
(as do we all, or we wouldn't do something this dirty and difficult) but Sister Stories is
worth talking about |
|
http://berkeley.academia.edu/RosemaryJoyce/Books/128198/Sister_Stories_2000
|
| Kris Hirst |
It's really a perfect example of the imperfect
information that archaeology presents, how did you ever get involved? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
My brother Michael Joyce, one of my collaborators
on Sister Stories, is a writer working in hypertext fiction, and he invited me to
collaborate on the project; |
| Rosemary Joyce |
he wondered if there was some material from
Mesoamerica appropriate for a project, and after I talked about the 16th c. Mexican
Florentine Codex and my own work on it; he thought it was ideal; it already *is*
hypertext, since Sahagun, the compiler, interviewed Nahuatl speakers and cut their
responses into an encyclopedia form. |
| Rosemary Joyce |
What I was doing for myself was seeking out the
sections about daily life, and reassembling them, and that provided a basic world in which
we wrote. |
| Rosemary Joyce |
What the collaboration allowed us to do was
introduce specialist and non-specialist approaches to the same material (multivocality, in
the current jargon) |
| Pat Garrow |
what a term! |
| Rosemary Joyce |
and also to introduce dialogue between all of us
as I tried to explain things to my collaborators, and they communicated their
understandings through new writing, telling stories. |
| IreneH |
So it's a fiction project? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
I originally thought of it as a creative work
(fiction), but really, it is a hybrid-- the sections from the Aztec sources are rich
primary data, reassembled to highlight everyday life, and women's experiences, instead of
assigned to the places Sahagun put them. The introduction of the non-archaeologists gives
an entree to people who find the Aztec material hard to enter into (most people do-- it is
very tough, very other). The contemporary stories make the Aztec stories more humane. |
| IreneH |
What do you mean by "contemporary" vs.
"Aztec" stories? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
the collaborators wrote modern stories (set in
the here and now) that represented their understanding of the Aztec material; one is a
long story about a young woman, others are fragments about being family. |
| Rosemary Joyce |
The linking mechanism makes it quite likely that
a reader who reads a section of Aztec material will flow into a modern story and vice
versa. |
| IreneH |
(that's what I thought) |
| Pat Garrow |
how do you flesh out the documentary evidence
Rosemary? I know it is fiction, but I suspect it is "fiction plus" |
| Rosemary Joyce |
The idea is to show that we modern people
(whether archaeologists or not) make sense of the past by providing our own narratives for
the traces and fragments... |
| Rosemary Joyce |
The core of Sister Stories is the 16th c. texts
Sahagun assembled. The last version I could measure had literally hundreds of pages of
text, much of it from the Aztecs. |
| Rosemary Joyce |
To this, among other things, I have added
commentary, based on the way I teach Aztec material myself: descriptions of key cultural
concepts, site features, etc. |
| Rosemary Joyce |
One of the things about Aztecs of course is for
Tenochtitlan-- the capital, which Sister Stories is about-- we have little archaeology,
all of that monuments. |
| Pat Garrow |
how do these narratives compare to those being
done by the Praetzellises and others in North America? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
What I am doing is closely related to what the
Praetzellises and people like Mary Beaudry are doing in N America. I would like to think I
come up to Adrian's standard in terms of documentary support-- so when we fictionalize, it
is based in fact-- but it is closer to Mary Beaudry's diaries that we don't have-- but
could have had, in another world. |
| IreneH |
So this is all created in hypertext, with links,
etc. |
| Rosemary Joyce |
Hypertext is definitely the enabling medium for
this, although I like to argue (if only for the sake of argument) that not all hypertext
is computerized-- museum exhibits are hypertexts. But Sister Stories relies on connecting
as much as on writing-- going from one text to a linked one is a form of commentary, it
means the two inform each other. even if we only link, and don't comment on the link |
| IreneH |
All historical fiction is good only when based in
fact, IMO |
| Pat Garrow |
I see. the use of narrative has certainly become
popular in historical over the past few years, with regular symposia at the SHA meetings |
| Rosemary Joyce |
Ruth Tringham suggests fiction is one of our main
archaeological resources for thinking about the past... |
| Rosemary Joyce |
Yes, narrative is obviously front and center in
archaeology today; I am actually completing a book for Blackwell on narrative in
archaeology |
| Kris Hirst |
I saw a wonderful film made by Ruth Tringham at
the SAA's; could you talk about her influence? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
Ruth Tringham's work is opening up wonderful
possibilities; I think you may have seen her AAA paper in Meredith Chesson and Susan Kus's
session. |
| Kris Hirst |
I think you're right |
| Rosemary Joyce |
and so she is making hypertext multimedia
"operas": works that include everything from field video to plans to imaginative
reconstructions, many done on computer. |
| Pat Garrow |
this will be web based then Rosemary? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
One of her real unique abilities is her sense of
how sound influences us. Most of us, myself included, never put in sound. Ruth uses music
to set the scenes, and reminds me that real experience uses all the senses. Here at
Berkeley, as her colleague, I have had the pleasure of working to develop teaching
approaches in which our students do for instance multimedia team projects instead of
traditional papers-- we train them in the tools as well as the content, and they do
incredible things (some of which you can see on the website for our center: http://www.mactia.berkeley.edu. |
|
Here's a link to Tringham's Opovo Project:
http://www.qal.berkeley.edu/~mirjana/sel_opovopg.html
|
| Kris Hirst |
I was actually going to ask you if you considered
sound for Sister Stories; how interesting, it's probably the influence of that video |
| IreneH |
Sound can be overdone though. I wear a hearing
aid, and I'm getting really exasperated with the excess of sound on those PBS specials, |
| IreneH |
I mean background sound; Not only the nature
stuff, historical documentaries too |
| Rosemary Joyce |
I agree about background sound on the PBS nature
model-- what Ruth does is put music as the soundtrack (and text on the screen). In
Sisterstories, at one point we had pronunciation of Nahuatl words-- I had a great time
taping sections of the Nahuatl read out loud-- but it was so huge then that we couldn't
keep it in, and the project evolved without it. |
| IreneH |
You have voice and music concurrent, that's
difficult if you have a hearing problem |
| Rosemary Joyce |
The other thing I should say, of course, about
Ruth is that this is driven by an understanding of archaeology's potential, which is that
understanding the past is improved by multivocality, and that multiple understandings of
the same data are possible; so hypermedia, with their nonlinearity or multi-linearity, and
multivocal collaboration, are strengths of the medium. |
| Pat Garrow |
I have seen great reviews for the Sister Stories
Rosemary. how has the public reacted to it? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
So far, all the reactions I have heard are good;
and they come from a wide range of audiences. The work is very challenging, so I was
concerned, but a lot of people confess to spending more time on it than they intended. And
students do find it useful in learning about Aztecs. |
| IreneH |
Who are your audiences? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
In terms of the audiences we hoped would
appreciate the work, since there are three of us who created it, we have different
audiences in mind. Michael and Carolyn are engaged with a large community, international
in scope, of hypertext writers and their students; that audience has been very positive
about the work, which has introduced more cultural diversity and more factional material
(if I can coin a term). |
| Rosemary Joyce |
My initial way of thinking about it was that I
would never tell anyone about it, since I expected a lot of flak for mixing fact and
fiction, but feminist archaeologists, archaeologists of Mesoamerica, and even household
archaeologists have all been positive about it. I use it in teaching as well. I think it
is accessible on multiple levels, although clearly, if Aztecs are totally uninteresting to
you it may not work... |
| Kris Hirst |
I thought at first it would be chaotic, but the
end result really is close to James Joyce, except perhaps more accessible |
| Rosemary Joyce |
One of the reasons that Sister Stories is not
chaotic is that it is actually extremely structured-- something I have tried to write
about. |
| Rosemary Joyce |
We began it as a freestanding Storyspace
document, which is a hypertext editing and writing system, and I used the tools there to
organized material and link systematically (e.g. every reference to white feathers was
linked together). |
| Rosemary Joyce |
In that sense, it was a real research tool for
me, and I wrote an article and a book chapter from that initial work, since I discovered
things I never realized before in the process. Just collaborating on it took work-- we had
a single master copy on an FTP site that was checked out and in by each writer, and one
thing I think we all did was map out each other's work and try to trace things. Storyspace
helped, since paths could be named, and you can walk backwards along a path, so links
worked. |
| Rosemary Joyce |
Plus, I laid it out as a map (a big circle of the
calendar months, with places in the middle-- this is preserved in the HTML version as a
screen) so we could literally "navigate". |
| IreneH |
Hmm, interesting. I may not be an archaeologist,
but I do some web design as a hobby. |
| Pat Garrow |
fascinating |
| Rosemary Joyce |
And then, when Carolyn took on the task of making
an HTML version, she did a whole formal design with the intention of giving people
unobtrusive senses of place |
| Rosemary Joyce |
It took about six years to do, and while we had
versions to show all along the way, the reason it works now is the work that we did on it.
Which was all fun. |
| Pat Garrow |
quite a long time. can what you learned along the
way considerably shorten the next effort? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
Definitely, we are dealing with the learning
curve... |
| IreneH |
So you teach the process then? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
actually, in our teaching initiative, we have
made the same progress in 2-3 courses-- we think we know how to teach people to do this
now; one of my students actually has developed the most fabulous hypertext for archaeology
I have ever seen, with two courses under her belt. |
| Pat Garrow |
great-that will mean that your method will be
more widely applied |
| IreneH |
It's a whole new world out there. Can you imagine
what future museums will be like? |
| Pat Garrow |
perhaps places that are alive? unlike now |
| Rosemary Joyce |
Museums in the future: I have a whole vision of
what I would love to see, but I like to remind myself that as a curator, giving up control
of exhibits (in a museum I worked on in Honduras) has meant that I have had to provide
what the people wanted-- which was an old-fashioned culture-history presentation! But when
I dream, I seehow is that symbolized, or us getting away from the grand narratives that
NEH has fostered (every exhibit tells a story, but visitors shrug these off-- |
| Rosemary Joyce |
some wonderful visitor research by Constance
Perrin shows that visitors focus on the minute and things that resonate with them)-- so I
would love to see us focus on resonance. |
| IreneH |
We've got our youngsters to appreciate history.
They are so talented in media work. I was a judge at History Day a week ago, in the Junior
Media class, and what I saw was amazing> |
| IreneH |
6-8th graders |
| Kris Hirst |
could you talk about the things you didn't
realize before? this is way too tantalizing a comment to let go by |
| Rosemary Joyce |
Kris asked me a question I cannot let by: what
did I learn that I hadn't realized before doing Sister Stories? As I used the search tools
to find all instances of evocative words (like feathers) I began to see connections
between certain events in people's lives and the actions of impersonators of the gods; I
realized that some of the ceremonies treated god impersonators like young adults or
children; I began to actually see the kinds of language and symbolism applied to children,
and what leapt out was that childrenwere not human, but raw material, to be worked into
form. |
| Kris Hirst |
I'm sorry; I can't resist--so is there a moment
in Aztec life when a child becomes human and how did you recognize it? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
Kris, I can't resist either: Aztec life cycle
rituals gradually socialized children, first by teaching them work habits, and in
parallel, by piercing their ears, cutting their hair, and dressing them in clothing |
| IreneH |
So I can just imagine what they can do in the
future |
| Pat Garrow |
but most museums are so static--not interactive
and nothing but displays that stare back at you |
| Rosemary Joyce |
So now I am multitasking here: the issue for me
for museums is how do we create resonance: I think we need more objects with more context
(a violation of museumpractices and preferences for short texts) and computers seem the
obvious way to do this: a case with something like "Aztec childhood" with a
monitor with a database of sources on ritual, texts and images, ideally with multiple
people giving their opinions and ideally with a place for you, the visitor, to add your
own... |
| IreneH |
I could envision that |
| Pat Garrow |
did the Aztec attitude towards children come in
part from a high infant/child mortality rate? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
The Aztec view of children was not dismissive--
it isn't (or isn't only) the cautious regard for children when they will die young,
although that is there-- in Sister Stories we have texts about death of young children
that are poignant. Rather, the Aztec attitude was that all people had to be constantly
whipped into shape through constant self-monitoring; they were very aware of decorum, and
children were different. Are different, I should say: they start out incapable of speech,
they can't govern their bodies, they are really not very much like adults; and Aztec
sources suggest this was recognized, and at the same time they were precious: like raw
green stone, like unworked feathers... |
| Pat Garrow |
sounds somewhat Calvinist |
| IreneH |
...and ancient Roman, at least for boys |
| Kris Hirst |
Providing multivocality is so hard to do; because
it means you have to let go of your authority. Was there a point (in Sister Stories, or
elsewhere) at which you were able to let go, that you can define? And how the heck do you
do it? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
The multivocality and authority nexus is still
hard for me. I like something Carolyn Guyer wrote about another collaborative project she
did-- how hard it was to accept people writing things that were just not as good, and
sometimes breaking something good. I think working this way makes you appreciate others
for their skills, and take on more responsibility for developing the good (I know Michael
and Carolyn have immeasurably improved my abilities as a writer). But it was hard for me
to see anything change; I think it is ironic that I am committed to feminist politics, but
I basically run things like any other field director, and have had to learn to share and
play nicely. |
| Rosemary Joyce |
In Sister Stories, I knew I had to be committed
to sharing determination of what we would do and where we would go, and it was harder than
in my field projects |
| Rosemary Joyce |
where I collaborate, and write collaboratively--
although I suspect my co-directors would have a thing or two to say about how little
authority I give up). |
| Pat Garrow |
hard skill to acquire. |
| IreneH |
in any profession, Pat |
| IreneH |
Speaking of feminist archaeologists, how tough is
it for you in the archaeologist community, if tough at all? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
Irene's question about being a woman (and a
feminist) in archaeology is one I always feel torn in answering. The truth is I think that
I have continued in spite of a lot of culture that doesn't let up on some expectations
that have little to do with competence-- e.g. the emphasis on being able to "move
dirt" or "cover ground" and the drinking culture that, I am pleased to see,
is changing a little in the next generation. But I also feel that I personally have been
able to negotiate a lot of the culture intact because I work in Latin America, where I am
a N American first, a woman a far distant second. |
| Pat Garrow |
my wife and I did an article a few years back
based on the study of men and women who had beenemployed by our firm. found that while men
and women were hired in equal numbers, women leave the field earlier and at a higher rate
than men |
| IreneH |
Did you come to any conclusions as to why, Pat? |
| Pat Garrow |
yes we did Irene. It had to do with traditional
roles of men and women that even women in archaeology allowed themselves to fall into |
| Rosemary Joyce |
Sometimes people argue that the difference in
women's career trajectories has to do with personal choice; but I also have noticed that
female students may question themselves more, and may be more reluctant to do
career-enhancing things like give papers about their preliminary research or seek funding
for it |
| Kris Hirst |
Did you read, by the way, Cheryl Claassen's
article in World Archaeology (I know, I know,we're going off onto tangents) |
| Rosemary Joyce |
Obviously, this is not genetic, it is a matter of
socialization, and any individual woman or man may be different (I sometimes joke that I
basically fit the male characterizations in all articles about archaeology-- I draw sharp
lines around features, for example, without a problem. But I have seen this pattern |
| Pat Garrow |
we found have not seen that Kris. Our article was
in Claassen's U. Pennsylvania Press book |
| Rosemary Joyce |
Tangents are good places to go in the last few
minutes; yes, I saw Cheryl's article; what about it? |
| Kris Hirst |
She argues that part of the problem for women
going into a man's field has been the fear of being viewed as homosexual; and although I'm
not sure I agree with the exact characterization, I do think that there's a male-ness
aspect to archaeology that we as females have to deal with. |
| Pat Garrow |
that may have been true 20 years ago, but I would
question that now |
| Kris Hirst |
to choose archaeology as a profession is a male
thing, still |
| Pat Garrow |
also more chauvinism in the west in our field in
my opinion |
| Rosemary Joyce |
The argument Cheryl is making is, I think, worth
exploring in general; or to restate it in a form that may seem very different, but isn't,
if archaeology has traditionally had a very tightly defined image of what an archaeologist
is, then that may have created a variety of intolerances (and I would add class
intolerance here) that we are largely not conscious of; including presumptions about
sexuality that create a standard expectation of boy-girl dynamics which is just not
professional (sorry if that sounds prim)' |
| Pat Garrow |
I think CRM has helped beat that down a bit |
| Rosemary Joyce |
CRM has helped change a lot of bad culture in the
field, and has been a lifesaver for women who love archaeology but hated the academic
culture |
| Pat Garrow |
CRM firms cannot afford to overlook talent |
| IreneH |
What's your student ratio in your classes,
Rosemary? |
| Rosemary Joyce |
The student ratio in our classes? I think
undergrad is primarily female (which I think is nation wide) although maybe 60/40, 1/3-2/3
rather than more dramatic; |
| Kris Hirst |
We should let you off the hook, Rosemary. This
has been delightful, and thank you so much for coming. |
| IreneH |
This was most interesting, Rosemary! |
| Pat Garrow |
yes indeed Rosemary, this has been a terrific
chat |
| Rosemary Joyce |
Thanks for the invitation! |
| Pat Garrow |
Our guest for next week is Larry McKee, who
served as Director of Archaeologist at the Hermitage in Nashville, Tennessee for 11 years.
His topic will be African American archaeology |
