A fieldwork manual as a regulatory device: Instructing, prescribing and describing documentation work

Abstract

Research on how archaeological fieldwork manuals, a sub-category of methods handbooks, regulate research documentation is limited. Qualitative content analysis of 25 English-language archaeological field manuals from the early 1900s to 2010s showed that they instruct how to describe the documentation work, prescribe practices and workflows, and function as often pre-coordinated descriptions of work. A manual forms a ‘working space’ that is sometimes adopted as such by following the detailed advice given in some of the texts but likely more often used as a more general point of reference. The fact that many manuals do not provide exact recipes for the fieldwork as a whole means that they function as comprehensive representations and documentation (paradata) of actual fieldwork practices only when read in parallel with field documentation.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.