Sharing sherds

As any of you reading this will almost certainly know already, this blog started life as a series of emails home to family and friends. After writing two or three separate emails a day to my parents, my girlfriend, and others telling them about what I'd seen that day in the excavations or protests, I decided I could send them updates more efficiently by just writing a blog. Which was true - but as soon as I started writing the blog as a blog rather than as emails, I started to have to think much more about what I was writing.

I'm not just talking about the sense I now have that there might be other readers out there somewhere, and of having to tailor things to a slightly wider audience. I'm also bringing up a point about archaeology as a contemporary practice that I've already come across one or two times on this, my first dig. The problem, put simply, is that archaeology carries on (like many professions) in its approach to intellectual property as if social media didn't exist. But, as you may have realized, they do exist.

More fully, the problem is that traditionally, the person who finds an object has the right to publish it. (Except, of course, that it's really the director or the supervisor of the workman or student who finds the object who exercises that right.) This traditional situation was problematic enough in itself, since archaeologists who were not quick to prepare things for publication could sit on finds for years or decades, thus depriving a whole generation of scholars of useful material for research (and career-advancement).

There were also leaks. Technically, the local ephorate (see the post below) should know about a find before it goes public. But I was told recently about an episode a few decades ago involving the ephorate, the then director of the excavation, and the Painted Stoa (a portico in the ancient city which displayed paintings of Athenian military victories). After uncovering the Painted Stoa, the then director told a journalist from a popular magazine about it before the ephorate had gotten around to asking about the new find. When the building appeared in the next month's issue of the magazine, the ephorate complained to the director, who suggested to the officials that they might have found out earlier had they asked earlier. The reaction of the ephorate to this was to suspend the excavations for a few seasons while relations normalized.

But such leaks happened only as quickly as printing presses could print. Nowadays, all that is required is for a student digger to post a picture of a new find onto Facebook or Twitter, and an unpublished inscription can be available to all that person's friends, or the entire Internet, instantaneously. It's not surprising, then, that we were given guidelines at the beginning of the dig, the central regulation being: no photographs of finds on social media. The same, of course, applies to blogs. So while my family and friends can eagerly await reports of sherds and stones when I arrive home, there won't be any report of them here; just the impressions and musings of a tiro in archaeology at the epicenter of the European sovereign debt crisis.