Collection of original studies on the contemporary practice of archaeology as a professional and scholarly endeavor.

This volume charts archaeological ethnography as a new territory of engagement and research. Archaeological Ethnography is defined here as a trans-disciplinary and trans-cultural space, a meeting ground for diverse publics and researchers, in archaeology, social anthropology, and potentially other disciplines practices and traditions. It is a space that encourages and fosters dialogue, collaboration and critique on materiality and temporality, on archaeology as a social practice in the present, on the links, interactions and associations amongst things and people, on local and trans-local valorisations of past material remains. Bringing together the most notable practitioners of this new area from archaeology and social anthropology, and building on a wide range of case studies from England, Greece, Italy, Kyrgyzstan, Mexico, Thailand, and the United States, the volume explores issues of definition and ontology, epistemology and method, but also ethics and politics. This dialogic book will inspire readers to shape their own view and position on this emerging field, and experiment with their own archaeological ethnographies.

In this revised thesis Matt Edgeworth views archaeological theory and practice through the eyes of an ethnographer. He examines the act of fieldwork for example as a craft that can be recorded and analysed as an ethnographer would treat his subject.

Ethnographic Archaeologies examines the role of ethnography in public archaeology, offering fresh insights into theories that advocate the engagement of archaeologists and archaeological investigations with the communities that are being studied.

Examines how the past is mediated by social engagements in the present and the consequences of those encounters. This book considers how concepts of nationalism.

In the accounts compiled in this book, ethnography occurs through processes of material and social interventions that turn the field into a site for epistemic collaboration. Through creative interventions that unfold what we term as “fieldwork devices”—such as coproduced books, the circulation of repurposed data, co-organized events, authorization protocols, relational frictions, and social rhythms—anthropologists engage with their counterparts in the field in the construction of joint anthropological problematizations. In these situations, the traditional tropes of the fieldwork encounter (i.e. immersion and distance) give way to a narrative of intervention, where the aesthetics of collaboration in the production of knowledge substitutes or intermingles with participant observation. Building on this, the book proposes the concept of “experimental collaborations” to describe and conceptualize this distinctive ethnographic modality.