Disasters in Field Research

Preparing for and Coping with Unexpected Events

Bibliographic Data

ID7539836
AuthorsMitchell Allen (0000-0001-5368-2760, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, Mills College, and Scholarly Roadside Service, 1250-I Newell Avenue #142, Walnut Creek, CA 94596 USA; [email protected], corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume4
Issue4
Pages363-365
Publication date2016-11-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology & Heritage Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2166-3548 • E-ISSN: 2166-3556
PublisherThe Pennsylvania State University Press (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.5325/jeasmedarcherstu.4.4.0363
OpenAlexW4232572458
LanguageEN
Citations received11

Doctoral advisors: Looking for a way to help your PhD candidates about to engage in their first fieldwork? You could do worse than this book. You've tutored them on V. Gordon Childe and Ian Hodder, made sure they can tell the difference between Iron 1 and Iron 2 cooking pots, and drilled them on stratified versus vector surveying. What's been missing in their education has been the nitty gritty of what really happens when they embark on their first field research, all those logistical issues that bedevil every project.That is the goal of this book, a volume replete with useful advice for junior scholars going into the field for the first time. Written by three experienced fieldworkers—a health researcher, a cultural anthropologist, and a paleontologist (regrettably, no archaeologist)—the book attempts, generally successfully, to cover topics that are usually learned by grad students in less systematic ways. Sometimes, the logistical knowledge comes from sitting around the lobby bar at an ASOR or SAA meeting, listening to lurid tales of the field from the old codgers, who have done it for decades. Sometimes, it is from meeting with their dissertation advisors in “Did you remember to...?” conversations. Surely, there must be a more effective way to learn project management than that.The topics are well chosen. The chapters are down-to-earth and practical. There are dozens of useful tips on each topic. The advice is leavened with about 50 brief stories of incidents and trials in the field, contributed by several dozen field researchers invited by the authors. Getting permits, finding accommodations and transportation, getting the equipment to work in the field, health and safety issues, care and feeding of field notes and data, and working with local communities, all warrant their own chapters in this format. There are useful recommendations of other sources to read. Several chapters have checklists of things to remember. While there are three authors and many tales of the field contributed by others, the writing is seamless and very readable. The book ends with a self-assessment tool for the student in a chapter entitled “Is Fieldwork for Me?” It probably should have been the first chapter. All in all, I wish I had read this book before my first field project.Some common themes emerge from all of these stories. Most are obvious to those who have been in the field but will be a novelty for the eager grad student anxious to get out there. Making a reconnaissance visit to your field site before committing to working there for years is always a good idea, as is picking the brains of senior archaeologists, who have already worked in that area. Finding a reliable local collaborator can help a researcher avoid many of the legal, political, and cultural problems in the local community that can scuttle a project. Test everything out at home before you undergo the expense of shipping it half way around the world. Make copies of everything. Many of them. Take good care of yourself, physically and mentally. Develop a posture of flexibility and an unshakable sense of humor if you wish to survive.Experienced field researchers will likely find a few “I didn't think of that” suggestions. For me, these included the point that concerns about customs, permits, and licenses in the country where fieldwork is taking place is only half the story. Getting your material back into your own country safely and without airport holdups, lost materials, or large customs duties is often equally challenging. The vignette about the poor medical researcher, who returned to Atlanta with vials of urine in liquid nitrogen collected in the field, makes transporting potsherds seem like a snap (Box 3.6).The authors are not afraid to discuss the inevitable TD (euphemism for Traveler's Diarrhea). Agustin Fuentes' advice: Stay hydrated, and stay in place until you're well. They don't shy away from the ethically equivocal but often necessary ways to circumvent formal systems to get things done, as in Gerald Lombardi's story from Brazil: I sat down with him in a booth in a dimly lit bar and was introduced to a man I'd never seen before. His name was not given, but he was identified as someone who helped the restauranteur get things through customs. He listened patiently while I explained my situation, and then he said that, as a favor, he'd see what he could do. (Box 3.4)The chapter on equipment (Chapter 4) is particularly valuable for archaeologists, who are taking an ever-increasing number of items to do remote sensing, site mapping, and analysis of materials. While most Middle Eastern projects won't have to worry about tropical fungi eating their cameras (p. 62), the advice about having multiple sources to power the equipment, testing it in different settings before leaving for the field, and having an analog backup plan in case the equipment fails to work is valuable. Key to this discussion is ensuring the survival of data gathered, more easily preserved and manipulated on your laptop than in field notebooks ... until your computer stops working. The authors' discussion and advice on maintaining both physical and digital records might avoid the disaster that wipes out months of work.The chapter on work in war zones and areas prone to violence (Chapter 7) will resonate with anyone working in our region. Advice includes having an evacuation plan in place, registering with the embassy, exploring university resources to extract you if necessary, and paying attention to changing political conditions. Even the chapters on working with live informants in the community (Chapters 3 and 4) will have value to archaeologists, who are housed in one. Though our work does not usually involve community members as subjects, the issues of power, gender, insider/outsider relations, building partnerships, language, and cultural norms in the community are still crucial for the success of an archaeological project.The idea of using checklists in this kind of book is a very good one. There is a “Recommended Basic Travel Medical Kit” (Box 8.7) and “Basic Food and Water Precautions” (Box 8.1) that will help junior scholars. Future editions might consider adding more of these as a way of consolidating the advice into a visually immediate format.There are some limitations to the work. In trying to be all things to all fieldworkers, they can miss the boat for readers of JEMAHS on some topics. None of the authors is an archaeologist, none of the stories focuses on working in the Middle East or eastern Mediterranean, and some of the problems and solutions are less relevant than they would be on a book more directly focused on our particular region and activity. For example, the health chapter rolls out an endless set of tropical diseases, their symptoms, and possible field treatments. Yet, the items that are most familiar to me in my field work in the Middle East—Lyme disease from ticks, scorpion stings, heat stroke—are ignored. While the authors spend a whole chapter on relations with live field subjects, they ignore our “informants”—the dead—and the ethical, legal, and cultural issues involved in excavating human remains in cultures sensitive to that activity. Nor do cultural anthropologists often need to cope with the mass of artifactual remains that archaeologists collect. There is no section on preservation, transportation, care, and curation of materials collected in the field.The book is mistitled, probably by an overly enthusiastic marketing director at the publisher. For the book is careful to provide advice on how to AVOID disasters in field research, rather than catalog the ones that each of us experiences. Even with the good advice in the book, each field project experiences its own disasters, but a careful read and attention to the advice given here should minimize those to the “shit happens” variety.There is probably too much information on managing projects here to recommend to students doing fieldwork on one of the larger excavation projects. The book is also very focused toward United States scholars and students doing “international” fieldwork in developing countries of Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. Issues are somewhat different for local researchers or those coming from the European Union, Australia, or East Asia.Despite these shortcomings, the practical advice makes this a worthwhile investment for grad students who are planning their first fieldwork project. Experienced researchers will also likely pick up a tip or two, enough to warrant dipping into the volume before gifting it to their favorite student

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