Divided Attention: The Need to Reassess the Institutionality of Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeology has reached a point of critical mass in term of organizational institutionality. There are simply too many organizations, groups, committees, and subcommittees within archaeology that divide our time funding. Not only does this leave us in an unsustainable cycle of competition for funding but it also creates barriers of communication between various approaches to archaeology. The convoluted landscape of institutionality has led to a supported fragmentation of the field, separating specialties and different types of archaeology into distinctly different groups, building facades that prevent meaningful sharing of knowledge and dissemination of information. The groups and organizations that support archaeologists, although well-meaning and often working collaboratively, have entered a state of stagnation and must be reassessed by their members. Furthermore, we must seek to better contextualize these organizations, who are their members? What do their members want? What tools, technologies, and theories do their members employ? How do these things differ between groups like the AIA, SAA, SHA, ACRA, the RPA, and internationally? We need to begin examining this infrastructure and ask the discipline if such a divided landscape is necessary and whether these groups could benefit their members more if their efforts were consolidated.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35559.0