Battle or ballet? Metaphors archaeological Facebook administrators live by

Abstract

The emergence of online social networks such as Facebook provide new opportunities for communication between archaeologists, and between archaeologists and communities. In this study, we used qualitative text analysis and conceptual metaphor analysis of conversations with eleven European archaeological Facebook site administrators to understand their motivations and ideas. We found that altruistic motivations coexist with emotional, career, and social capital expectations, that pseudo-archaeology and political weaponization of archaeology are major concerns, and that participants' conception of themselves and the archaeological Facebook sites they manage are based on multiple conceptual metaphors, revealing different, deliberative vs. agonistic, conceptions of social media community interaction, while top-down metaphors are contested by participatory, bottom-up metaphors, pointing to important dilemmas for the poetics and politics of contemporary public archaeology.