Books like Dug to Death

This book is one of my absolute favorites for expressing how archaeology really works on a macro level. As a student, I learned that archaeology has often been co-opted to serve political and nationalist purposes.

But the hows and whys of that process weren’t clear until I started doing archaeology. I love how Nadia Abu El Haj makes extremely clear why archaeology as a science lends itself so well to solidifying claims about identity, history, and land. I really admire how Abu El Haj captures what happens between the direct, tangible encounter of a person with an artifact and the abstract, national level of narrative construction and policymaking.

This was one of the first archaeology books I was assigned when I started studying archaeology, and I only appreciate it more and more with time. I don’t think there is any book the captures so well the fact that real archaeologists actually learn much more from everyday, mundane objects—rather than from the monuments and treasures that archaeology in the movies is all about. 

I still remember, too, the moment this book made it ‘click’ for me that archaeology often reveals secrets that contradict the written record. A plantation owner might say, for instance, that they designed and built their house, but they can’t hide the existence of the front porch and other traces of African architectural and construction techniques.

My copy of this book is riddled with nearly 20-year-old post-it notes, each one representing an epiphany for a budding archaeologist just ahead of her first summer of excavation.

This book, for me, is something of a guiding star. It is profound, scientific, powerful, and directly applicable to contemporary debates about policy, governance, and justice. Archaeology isn’t just about collecting objects; instead, most archaeologists I know are deeply invested in how archaeology can help inform the decisions we make in the present. MacArthur “genius” award winner Jason de Leon shows the full potential of this in this book, where he combines archaeological, ethnographic, and forensic methods to reveal the impact of immigration policy on real human bodies and families.

Maybe it’s cheating to include this book on this list; it isn’t just how archaeology works—it has set a new standard for archaeologists to make contributions that are relevant and resonant enough to make a change in the world.

I read this book at a time when I was feeling dissatisfied with archaeological writing’s ability to capture the feeling of being at an archaeological site—all of the sensory experiences and historical enigma.

I loved that much of this book was written as a series of dialogues that actually took place while walking around Stonehenge. I also love that this text looks directly at different people’s thoughts and experience of the site, and allowed those contestations and disagreements to remain unresolved.

To me, this book felt like the uncertain social experience of finding so much, and yet never enough, through the archaeological process.

I love that Ingold uses the concept of design to explore how people make meaning and things meaningful. By bringing me through lenses such as architecture, archaeology, and art, he shows me that design is not a process of doing but of making.

When we design, we do so by constructing meaning and knowledge. The artifacts that come from my design thinking are secondary effects of the thinking and meaning-making. I love being brought into a larger point of view on the everyday activities of my own life.

Wylie’s philosophical journey over the past 22 years has mirrored (and in some senses helped to create) the landscape of contemporary archaeological philosophy.

Certainly Wylie’s commitment to developing an ethical and inclusive archaeology, where discussions of research agendas such as feminism should not be ruled out by the application of empiricism, has done a great deal to support the work of archaeologists also committed to those agendas. 

Hamilakis’s Archaeology and the Senses was one of the first books I read when starting to explore multisensory history, and it totally altered my view of how we study the past.

Focusing on Bronze-Age Crete, Hamilakis examines how archaeology has engaged with the bodily senses thus far and critiques its emphasis on sight and the traditional hierarchy of the five senses in the west.

Moreover, he proposes an innovative and exciting means by which archaeology can move beyond its focus on visual experiences of artefacts, environments, and materials to bring in lost and neglected, yet just as important, bodily senses such as sound, smell, taste, and touch.

Through this approach to archaeology he seeks to evoke a deeper, richer insight into the breadth of human experience in past societies.

I studied at Tel Aviv University, where the name Gideon Toury was uttered in reverent tones. I never met Toury in person, and it was only towards my graduation that I finally got around to reading this iconic book.

To say that it is a smooth or engaging read would be a gross misrepresentation. Toury was a devout structuralist and a firm believer in the importance of scientific inquiry in the humanities. Accordingly, this is a book one reads in a staggered mode, one dense section at a time. This makes for an unusual reading experience, but there is something addictive about it, especially for contemporary readers.

We have grown so distant from this kind of extreme positivism, this undaunting belief in the possibility of unbiased scholarship, that for a brief moment, the numerous charts, formulas, and abbreviations that adorn the pages of Toury’s book seem almost amusing. But this… show more.

I’m always talking to scientists, but I have never undertaken anything like Bruno Latour’s voyage of ethnographic discovery. He decided to figure out how science works by embedding himself in a scientific lab for two years and, discarding all preconceptions, recording what he saw there as though he were an anthropologist visiting a foreign culture.

It turns out to be an intensely political culture: rather than following prescribed laws of method and logic, scientists are making judgment calls and negotiating with one another to decide the significance of their data, making it up as they go along. Latour brings out the subjectivity of much low-level scientific decision-making, in contrast to Kuhn’s picture, in which the blueprint for thinking—the paradigm—rules over the enterprise like a catechism.

Another research design textbook, this one more specifically about neuroscience. My co-author, neuroscientist Robert Calin-Jageman, highly recommends it.

This third edition has clear and up-to-date discussions of issues such as p hacking and publication bias that emphasise the need for Open Science. There’s a focus on effect sizes and confidence intervals, as in the new statistics. The book also describes strategies needed to enhance the rigor and reproducibility of neuroscience research.