快猫短视频

In archaeology, more than any other discipline, researchers working in the field must work and cooperate with colleagues from many nations and cultures. Excavations are almost always multinational affairs employing several different disciplines. Often they involve archaeologists from rich nations investigating the ancient cultures of poor ones. All this is a source of potential conflict, and archaeology in the past has suffered everything from accusations of looting and exploitation of local cultures to rows between rival academics over who should have access to a site.

As an archaeologist specialising in the Roman empire, Ian Haynes鈥檚 work has taken him to many countries and forced him to learn to collaborate across many cultural divides. Working on projects in Romania, Italy and Bulgaria, international cooperation has become key to his success. He spends much of his time working to resolve conflicts and finding ways to get researchers of different cultures and disciplines to cooperate on excavations. He specialises in making a virtue out of the differences.

He talks to Maggie McDonald about his success in smoothing the waters 鈥� and what he鈥檚 been doing in the pope鈥檚 basement in the Vatican.

Why is international cooperation so important in archaeology?

Within archaeology you have profound national and regional differences. For instance, working on the Apulum site in Transylvania, Romania, alongside colleagues from Germany and Romania, it struck me as intensely interesting that although they approached archaeology in quite different ways, they shared an awareness of classical literature that is lacking in students of provincial Roman archaeology from the UK. I found it was opening my mind to opportunities and possibilities I would not have considered.

Can these differences be problematic?

There are different cultures of communication, different ways of handling data and ideas. One of the things I鈥檓 interested in 鈥� and I鈥檝e been influenced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology鈥檚 work on innovation and culture 鈥� is how an archaeological project can bring together a group of people in a way that an institution cannot. A project team can be a marvellous incubator of ideas.

You have to look beyond the immediate aims of a project at how you use that privileged environment. You try to structure it in such a way that researchers in the different fields get maximum benefit. Some of the ideas from MIT need to be considered actively in archaeology. For example, we need to be much more explicit at recognising failures. In archaeology there is a tendency to cover up what we do not achieve, so that everything seems to progress naturally from research agenda to triumphant conclusion. So it is important to create a comfortable space so the most junior members of the team feel free to challenge anything.

How do you resolve differences of opinion?

I tend to use tensions to recognise potentially conflicting approaches. To encapsulate different national or methodological approaches in some of our projects, for example, we鈥檝e taken postdoc people from different traditions, put them in a room together and told them they need to come up with some answers to the questions we鈥檙e facing. This strikes fear into many. You may have one person who, after intense debate, remains doggedly determined to record something in a particular way and someone else who thinks that way is redundant. If they cannot resolve that, we do it both ways if possible, and by the end of the project we can see whether or not it was redundant.

鈥淚f they cannot resolve a question, we do it both ways if possible鈥�

Is there a lot of creative tension?

There is plenty. People who are good at thinking out of the box are not necessarily classic team players.

How do you manage that?

You have to spend a little more time reflecting on communication. People from different cultures have different ways of communicating. You have to speak to someone as they are likely to understand you best, not speak to them as you would be spoken to. I have underestimated the degree to which those interpersonal aspects can affect a research team. We鈥檝e had specialists who find the tension too much and cease to speak to one another.

What happens when you take a team from a rich country into a poorer one 鈥� say, when you go to Romania with teams from the UK and Germany? Does that affect the way the work is done?

The first thing to do is listen. It is difficult to convince people that you are genuinely interested in an open style of collaboration. People often say, these guys are more lavishly funded than us, why are they doing things a particular way, it is a waste of money. It creates an unevenness. You have to be careful, and respectful that local archaeologists have been working in an area for many years. Their involvement in all aspects of the project is vital to make it work.

Do your efforts at communication and cooperation take you away from the archaeology?

Even if you are working with fantastic people from different traditions, as I have been privileged to do, it ends up consuming a lot of energy. An archaeologist may end up as a project manager removed from what brought them into this. Without being too fuzzy about it, I am constantly working on relationships. Building a culture of archaeological ideas is a constant process. I try to introduce as many talented younger people as possible, as early as possible, to ways of cooperating. It is, I hope, a spirit of generosity that will affect their ways of working later on.

What are your most memorable days, when all this has come together?

The best days are when you have 鈥渆ureka鈥� moments. You have been working on a site for a long time; suddenly you see the landscape fundamentally differently. It becomes part of a larger whole. The last time it happened to me was when I was working on a citadel on the Black Sea coast. We had been plodding up and down with survey instruments over a battered site of mounds and grass. I suddenly looked at one feature and thought, that鈥檚 a tower. Then I saw where the town was. I found it quite terrifying because the more I looked at this site, which was probably 2700 years old, the more I saw what an unstable place this was to live. The town is now largely abandoned. It was one of those moments when you come face to face with the consequences of violence. You have this strange phenomenon in archaeology: it brings together intimacy with distance. You might be looking directly at some poor person who suffered horrifically before death but you are several thousand years from them, which allows you room to reflect. Many more scholarly colleagues would lament this, but I find in moments like these a kind of empathy springs up.

What are you doing in the pope鈥檚 basement?

I鈥檓 working on the old excavations under St John Lateran, one of the big basilica churches of Rome, the most important and influential of the lot. People have been digging under the Lateran since 1730. They鈥檝e come across the earlier basilica, a street market, buildings that housed the emperor鈥檚 equestrian bodyguard, richly ornamented rooms, a large bath complex, plus the first baptistery of the western world: an incredibly influential structure in its own right. It鈥檚 a challenge for an international multidisciplinary approach, because there are parts of the site where you physically cannot fit more than two people in at any one time.