Towards New Futures for Archaeological Data Production: Challenging Archaeonormativity through Storytelling

Abstract

Archaeologists create vast amounts of specialized data, which are often difficult to access, maintain, and reuse, even for practitioners themselves. In this article, we explore the implication of professional practices of data production in fueling archaeonormativity—i.e., the naturalization of behaviors and structures in archaeology that strip it of affect and meaning and that deny human (and non-human) agency and equity. We contend that storytelling with archaeological data-making, grounded in a narrative hermeneutic model, has promise for subverting the current archaeonormative establishment. Via experimentation on the cross-European Transforming Data Reuse in Archaeology project, we discuss the challenges of intervening in excavation and post-excavation activities through storytelling, from siloing of results to epistemic anxieties to destabilization of trust, leadership, and institutional authority. Nurturing creative, “story-critical” risk-taking in the course of archaeological data production may enable archaeologists to improve their own working contexts whilst also (re)distributing power inside and outside the profession.