The Archaeology of Failure

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "The Archaeology of Failure" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Failure is a fundamental part of the human condition yet remains undertheorized in archaeology. Failure is admittedly definitionally tricky and can operate at multiple scales, from the catastrophic downfalls of ancient societies to everyday blunders and mishaps. Yet the challenges make it all the more interesting. In this session, we bring together papers and researchers working on material from various periods in the New and Old Worlds, mixing case studies and theory. We examine what it means to fail, what failure looks like in the archaeological record, and what happens when we fail to fully appreciate failure.