Archaeological information-making activities according to field reports

Abstract

Accounts of how scholarly information is produced are crucial for understanding and using the information yet they are often criticized for being incomprehensive or even non-existent. This article aims to increase the understanding of how scholarly information-making is conceived and documented by information-makers. By analyzing how a set of archaeological field reports describe different aspects of the information-making activities (cf. Activity Theory) pertaining to the research documented in the reports, the study suggests that scholars might have a tendency to focus on reporting tools, outcomes and physical location of activities while descriptions of especially rules/norms, community factors and division of labour are rare and expected to be known tacitly. The findings suggest also that the descriptions of information-making activities become comprehensible in relation to their related activities. Therefore, an increased emphasis on explicating their underpinning social factors and how activity systems and their elements link to other activity systems could improve the comprehensiveness of documentation and decrease the need of tacit contextual knowledge.