Japanese Archaeology in Berkeley California

My name is John Ertl, an associate professor in the Foreign Language Institute at Kanazawa University. My specialty is cultural anthropology and, up to now, my research has focused on aspects of Japanese village life (Ertl 2007, Revisiting Village Japan), Multiculturalism (Graburn, Ertl, and Tierney eds. 2008, Multiculturalism in the New Japan), and Ethnicity and Tourism in East Asia (Ertl ed. 2011, Exploring Ethnicity and the State in East Asia). As a member of the Center for Cultural Resource Studies, I am fortunate to be conducting research supported by the Strategic Young Researcher Overseas Visits Program for Accelerating Brain Circulation (頭脳循環を加速する若手研究者戦略的海外派遣プログラム).

The following is a brief report on my current research activities. Since August 15, 2011, I have been working with Professor Junko Habu at the East Asian Archaeological Laboratory (EAAL) at the University of California, Berkeley. Up to now, we have been working with Berkeley students to classify Middle Jomon pottery from the Takada Site (Kanagawa Prefecture). There are three aspects of this research that are being worked on. Updates will be made as the research progresses.

Overview: Ethnography of Archaeology
My research project may be categorized as an "ethnography of the production of archaeological knowledge," and the central question that I am investigating is "what are the various social interactions involved in producing authoritative, reliable, and believable narratives regarding prehistory, nation formation, and ethnogenesis." To frame this in another way, as archaeology is the discipline most directly responsible for creating our understanding of the past, my objective is to observe the multiple sites where archaeologists and others work in order to directly observe the ways in which activities (such as excavation, lab analysis, conference reports, etc.) become accepted facts about the past.

This project is an offshoot of research on "Archaeology and Nationalism," which is a diverse and growing body of research examining how different national ideologies influence how archaeology is conducted (e.g. research agendas, funding, methods of analysis) as well as the results that are produced. The other body of research that guides my project comes from Science and Technology Studies, especially the work of Bruno Latour and Michel Callon and the idea of Actor Network Theory (ANT) – which maps the relations between people, concepts, and things: treating all members (animate and inanimate) as actors that exert an influence upon each other. Thus, my project takes up the project of archaeology and nationalism with an examination of the micro-level and day-to-day activities that are involved in the production of "networks" directed towards creating archaeological knowledge.

Project 1: Typology and Professional Vision in the Lab
From September 2011, I have been working in Professor Junko Habu's East Asian Archaeology Laboratory, where she and students have been sorting Jomon pottery. The work that I have been observing, and to a limited extent, participating in includes separating the potsherds into a classification based on styles and methods of production, making ink rubbings, drawing profiles of the pottery, and photocopying the rubbings and profiles into 50 percent scale sheets. A total of four students conducted over 200 hours of work on this project during the fall 2011 semester.

The frame for my study comes from Charles Goodwin's work on conversation analysis and professional vision. His work, as mine, looks at direct encounters between students and instructor – or those between students – in which they learn how to view and interact with the materials so as to develop competency in analyzing the materials. Thus, my study examines the social engagements involved in learning how to "do" archaeology. These are activities such as learning how to handle samples, what to look for within a sample, how to work with the tools to categorize and diagram them, and so forth. In the process of "doing archaeology" the students are learning how to "see as an archaeologist" – which are parts of building credentials to "become archaeologists."

Project 2: Carbon Dating and Accelerator Mass Spectrometry
The second project I am working on with Professor Habu is an investigation on the usage of accelerator mass spectrometry for carbon dating of archaeological samples. Currently (January 2012), we are still in the stages of negotiating a contract with the Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (CAMS) at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab. Between the fiscal years 2011-2012, we will date approximately 50 samples (nutshells, seeds, and marine shells) with the goal of finding concrete dates that correspond to the shift from Middle to Late Jomon Era.

My emphasis in this study is to open up the "black box" of carbon dating. As a relatively new technology (approximately 30 years old), accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) has become a commonplace method of providing dates of carbon based archaeological samples. Stemming from STS research, my interest is in following the history of debates on how this technology developed and became a mainstay in archaeological research. At the same time, my ethnography will focus on the concrete activities involved in sample selection, preparation, the use of the accelerator, and how results are interpreted. The selection of am AMS facility to conduct carbon dating may be a factor in how "reliable" the results are accepted by an academic community. Part of the issue that will be examined is how "specialty" in preparing samples is formed and how one becomes a "specialist" in using the lab.

Project 3: Conceptual Models of Archaeology
The third project that I am working on is still in its formative stages. Conducting a linguistic analysis of "how people talk about archaeology," my intent is to develop a conceptual model of the relations between activities, objects, and people involved in the production of archaeological knowledge. The primary stimulus for this research comes from the idea of "networks" (from actor-network theory), which posits that an activity such as archaeology brings together a host of "actors" (humans, inanimate objects, and ideas) together in a co-dependent relationship.

My study will analyze how archaeology is conceptualized by professional archaeologists (professors and graduate students) in order to provide a conceptual model of the relations between various actors and activities involved in archaeology. The primary reference for this study is work by Roy D'Andre (1976) on Multidimensional Scaling – which he used to write about "US American Beliefs about Illness."