Abstract

The biggest impact of Covid-19 on undergraduate archaeology students was arguably the lack of opportunities to undertake physical fieldwork. Despite the provision of digital alternatives, the pandemic necessarily resulted in the postponement of a crucial part of archaeological education for many students. As then-undergraduate students, whose first year was abruptly cut short by the first nationwide lockdown in the UK, with in-person instruction only resuming in the summer before our final year, the focus on theoretical training with the switch to online learning meant that when restrictions eased and excavations resumed, we were especially cognizant of the divide between the theoretical aspects of the discipline and the epistemic infrastructure deployed in the field – as well as the set of power relations in which fieldwork is embedded.

This article is premised upon Edgeworth’s (2003) argument that the fundamental ritual of archaeological knowledge-making consists of practical transactions between practitioners and material phenomena, which take place during the process of excavation. It is argued that, on research excavations, these material transactions are most often the domain of students and local labourers, who frequently possess privileged insight into the artefacts recovered, the excavation procedures, and the material environment which they form part of. Simultaneously, however, these are also the people who are the most disempowered within archaeology, defined here as both intellectual discourse and social institution. In this article, we trace the theoretical and disciplinary frameworks upholding this particular division of labour – manual versus intellectual – and its epistemological and political consequences. We contend that, if archaeology is to survive its own moral and political fissures, we must not only advance towards a more distributed, heterarchical form of knowledge-making that transcends traditional disciplinary divides between theory and practice, but also towards a kind of action that goes beyond self-centred theorising, to challenge the political economy of archaeology.

Keywords: Archaeological Labour, Epistemic Injustice, Knowledge Production, The Material Turn, Colonialism

How to Cite:

Wong, E. & Palá Gutiérrez, J., (2025) “The Politics of Archaeological Labour: Pandemic reflections on knowledge production, epistemic injustice, and the material turn in archaeology”, Papers from the Institute of Archaeology 35(1), 58–73. doi: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.2041-9015.1756