Price and Jaffe (2023) argue that acknowledging failure humanises the past. It can also serve as a lens through which to reflect on archaeological reasoning. Here, we turn to the Roman world, and the frontier of northern Britain in particular, to consider how intentionality, distributed agency and moral judgement intersect with the recognition of failure in the past—and with the failures of archaeologists themselves.
In Born losers: a history of failure in America (2005), historian Scott A. Sandage traces how, through the course of the nineteenth century, business failures gradually morphed into personal failures. Where losing money initially meant just that by the later nineteenth century, as the narrative of the ‘self-made man’ took hold, it came to be seen by society as a personal shortcoming and framed as a moral judgement. Fast-forward to the big-tech era of the twenty-first century and failure has become a trophy rather than a scar. Silicon Valley's credo of ‘fail fast and fail forward’ entrenches failure not only as a standard element of business practice—start-ups are expected to fail, their founders slated to move forward on their path to success—but also as a commendable addition to a CV or resumé thought to reflect ambition, innovativeness and resilience (see critique in Myers 2019). This admittedly truncated narrative of failure in America, closely intertwined with capitalist profit-seeking, serves to illustrate that failure is not a neutral concept but rather a social phenomenon, the reality and valence of which are context dependent. Moreover, like all social phenomena, failure has a history.
Price and Jaffe (2023) develop a compelling argument that archaeologists have under-theorised the role of failure in past human societies. The authors contend that we must adopt a flexible approach to failure and recognise that power asymmetries, distributed agency and the temporalities of outcomes all play a critical, if variable, role in the success or breakdown of a technology, cultural practice, or institution.
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