Meet the Blogger: Tony Cagle, serving up “old” news since 2004

In the world of heritage bloggers, Dr. Anthony Cagle is virtually ancient. According to his site “Archaeoblog,” he has been serving up old news since January 2004. And while he frequently offers insight on all facets of archaeology, he’s not afraid to throw in a bit of personal insight as well. Just take a moment to contemplate his Ode to Beer. Tony recently visited with Voices of the Past to talk about how he got in on the ground floor of the blogging revolution and what it takes to sustain a heritage blog for the long haul.

You were kind of the Lone Ranger in the archaeology profession when you began blogging. What compelled you to communicate in this way?

Short version: I saw Glenn Reynolds on his Instapundit blog getting a gazillion hits a day just for typing “Heh” and thought “Hey, I could do that.”

Long version: I’ve been messing around on the Internets since the ‘80s when it was just e-mail and BBSs on university computer terminals and I was just starting graduate school in archaeology. Then when the Web got going in the ‘90s, I participated in online discussion for mostly information technology (IT) based ones (I put myself through grad school doing statistical programming for the local public health department). I also played around on a couple of the start-up e-zine fora that were more oriented towards the general public, mostly by following the IT forum hosts to their new digs. So I’ve been swimming in the rough-and-tumble online world for a while and enjoyed interacting via the written word in this sort of rapid-response world.

Once weblogging came into vogue, I looked around and didn’t see much in the way of interactive web-based archaeological sites (pun intended). There were archaeological sites aplenty but they were the sort of top-down information-imparting sites that academics prefer. Academic archaeologists tended to prefer (still do, mostly) private email listservs for discussing purely academic topics, and creating web sites that largely mimicked their class structures. The reason I and so many others like blogs is both the interactive aspects – through both reader comments and other blogs – and the rapid updating that’s possible. You can not only post a link to an article or another blog post, but you can critically comment on it (positively or negatively), update it with later comments and links, and get reader comments that add very different perspectives.

I also thought that professional archaeologists were not doing the greatest job communicating with the general public about their work. I’m not the first one to think this and I readily acknowledge the difficulties involved. Academic archaeologists, especially those without tenure and just beginning their careers, are working in a very complicated environment in which all of their professional work is being scrutinized by their peers either explicitly or implicitly. In most cases, scientists tend to give their colleagues something of a stink-eye when one of them “goes popular” and attempts to communicate with the general public; it’s the cost of necessarily simplifying the field and developing the persona necessary to connect with ‘just plain folks’. John Hawks, a now-tenured physical anthropologist at my undergraduate alma mater, the University of Wisconsin-Madision, has talked about this a lot on his blog.

The alternative is leaving the business of popularizing archaeological work to reporters and others with limited technical knowledge, or those with an axe to grind. In steps the Web wherein one can directly interact with both peers and the general public on an equal level and with the time and space available to get as detailed as you want.

What is your intended “mission” for ArchaeoBlog?

First and foremost to provide an outlet for my need to blather on and on about whatever interests me. Yeah, it’s somewhat narcissistic, but that only extends as far as my hit counter indicates. The Internet is the great leveler that way.

But at base it’s really pretty simple: learning new stuff, both for me and for readers. I chose to be a general interest archaeology blog rather than concentrate on a narrow subject because. . .well, just because. I read the science journals to find out what’s going on in some depth in my chosen areas of interest and I blog to get a broader sense of what’s going on out there.

In a way, it’s like that old adage about teaching: if you want to learn about something, teach a class in it. I had a professor back in graduate school that served a stint on the National Science Foundation reviewing grant applications and he told us that during his time on the panel reading all those grant applications for an incredible variety of archaeological work, he had never felt as tuned-in to the wider world of archaeology as he did then. It sounds rather trite and cliché, but the best way to learn is by reading and talking a lot, and ArchaeoBlog lets me do both of those, and I hope it provides an opportunity for readers to do the same.

So I really try to post a lot of links to news articles that I find interesting or significant and that I think others will find interesting and significant, links to online academic papers that those with an interest can look at for themselves, and provide whatever technical commentary I have. I occasionally post an extended treatise on some subject or other that I happen to be working on, but I’m more of the Linking School of blogging.

You’re quite prolific. How do you keep content flowing on your blog?

Like everyone else: Wherever and whenever I come across something online. I have a couple of news-aggregator tools from the search engines that email me archaeology-related links (mostly from mainstream news outlets), academic listservs, reader email, some of the other fora that I post to. Archaeologica also has a daily news feed. And I review the odd TV program, book, or movie with archaeological links as well. Mostly, I try to provide links, links, and more links. When I first started I felt the need to link to absolutely everything I saw that had anything vaguely to do with archaeology; I eventually cut that down to items that have enough content so that they actually say something, or that were either generally significant, or that just plain interested me for whatever reason.

Of course, I also post on subjects I happen to be working on currently. I recently began doing a volunteer project at a local cemetery recording the older monuments for conservation and just to have a record of what is inscribed on them. I decided to do the entire data collection digitally on a PDA, no paper involved at all (I hate data entry with the heat of a thousand suns) so I’ve done a few posts on how that process has worked and what I’ve been finding. Some of the monuments have inscriptions in languages with which I am unfamiliar and ArchaeoBlog readers have provided information on the language and possible translations. And I occasionally dip into my own archive of field photos and do a post on what is being shown, what it meant at that particular site, etc.

I don’t limit myself to strictly archaeological topics either. I also post at another blog, Car Lust, and occasionally include some of that content at ArchaeoBlog. I also venture into old albums, old TV shows – the recent Land of the Lost remake provided ample fodder for posting – and movies, and a recent fascination I had with shaving. I’ve also posted on some personal stuff like my various house remodels, car remodels (I have a 1978 Mustang II that I did some restoration and modifications on), and various topics involving my array of felines. I try to avoid the latter since constantly chattering away about cats is the quickest way to bore non-cat people (of which I consider myself to be one, thank you very much) to death. Granted, cute cat pictures tend to drive traffic, but one must maintain some semblance of decorum. I usually try to work some archaeological angle into things, even if but for humorous effect.

Ann Althouse, a law prof at the University of Wisconsin, is a master at this. Although she has seemingly posted less and less on strictly law topics, she used to sprinkle non-law posts in with her generally Constitutional law discussions and the format made her extremely popular. Of course, she also poss on that great traffic-generator, politics, which I won’t touch with a ten foot. . .errr, trowel. Not that there’s no politics involved in either archaeology or heritage issues, but getting at all partisan is an easy way to stink up the place with vile comments. Heck, I got enough vile comments from an offhand comment making fun of shell middens. . .

What facet of archaeology most inspires your interest?

Finding out something about the past that no one knew before. That also sound rather trite and cliché as well, but really that’s what science is all about and why any of us got into it in the first place. The actual finding of artifacts is kind of fun, but that’s always been sort of ancillary for me; I can go into my back yard and dig up a rock no one has seen before so it’s not really the finding of stuff that interests me. I tend to view the archaeological record as data rather than objects of artistic or monetary (“treasure”) value. One of my favorite archaeologists is A.L. Kroeber, who invented the frequency seriation method of telling time in the absence of stratigraphy. For a generation of archaeologists it was the main way of structuring the way we view archaeological record and, via cultural history, is still a big part of how archaeology is done today. Contrast that with probably the most famous archaeological find of the twentieth century: Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun. While spectacular, it really didn’t have much impact on the business of archaeology outside of Egypt. And unlike radiocarbon dating, which came out of physics, this was a strictly archaeological invention that treated artifacts as quantitative data rather than starting points for speculation about past lifeways. Its results were replicative, could be corroborated by other methods (stratigraphy and later radiocarbon dating), and is really one of the few methodological innovations attributable to archaeology alone. Of course, Petrie came up with a similar scheme in Egypt with his Sequence Dating and at roughly the same time, which is simply fascinating in its own right.

Of course, there are the field stories, too. In how many other professions can you relate how you stumbled back from a party in Karnak temple during the nightly sound and light show and had to suddenly duck behind a sphinx because the lights are coming on right where you were about to become an unwitting part of the show?

Err, or so I’ve heard that can happen.

You seem to have found your calling in archaeology. When did you first catch the archaeobug?

Oddly, it was never a lifelong passion. When I was a kid I was a dinosaur fanatic. Then in high school I gravitated to computer nerd-dom and even started out college as a computer science major. I started getting disenchanted with the actual business of computer science – did I want to write assembly language code to sort linked lists the rest of my life? Why, no, I didn’t – and as part of the ancillary classes in the Arts and Sciences school I took an introductory anthropology course. I latched on to bioanth and archaeology, wound up in a human skeletal anatomy lab class, took a bunch of other archaeology classes, and bingo, I found myself trying to explain to my parents what I was going to do with an archaeology degree. The Indiana Jones movies helped sell it (to me and to them I guess) and also reading Donald Johannsen’s book Lucy also sold me on it as well (even though it’s not technically archaeology).

Of course, instead of trouncing around the world finding cool stuff, I found myself measuring half a dozen attributes on hundreds of pieces of lithic debitage (which I guess is kind of the archeological equivalent of writing assembly language code to sort linked lists) but I actually liked that.

You started blogging at the dawn of the social media revolution. What’s your perspective on using new media tools to communicate heritage?

It opens up a whole new avenue of communication, not just quantitatively but qualitatively as well. Instead of statically reading a book or watching a television program, people can now go online and interact with professionals involved in heritage issues, ask questions and get answers in quick order. They can also provide their own insights and that makes the communication process a two-way street. In a way, it’s a completion of the process that started with the printing press. Before, all people could do was talk with each other in a limited area. After, they could read things from people anywhere in the world, but not really talk back. Now, with the Internet we’ve completed the circle and people can read and respond to anyone, anywhere, at any time.

Hence, we can now go online anytime and find out what people are doing with similar interests half a block or half a world away. I’ll give you an example. I started a volunteer project surveying and assessing older monuments at a local cemetery because I noticed, while taking some evening walks at the place, that some of them were looking pretty unreadable and it might not be too long before all of that information was lost. So I went online and looked for other people doing similar cemetery restorations and assessments to see what sort of data they collected, what was important for conservation, etc. Turns out there’s something of a cemetery restoration movement that’s been going on for the past few years and there’s an enormous amount of information out there on what other people have done, what to look for, the best ways to clean a monument without damaging it, etc. Most of the people doing it are non-professionals who had an interest in conserving these properties and learned the best methods for preserving them from the few professionals that were out there.

Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit again) calls it an “Army of Davids”, which fits rather nicely into the archaeological/historical context here. There’s a lot of valuable work that amateurs can do and are doing to contribute to identifying and preserving archaeological and historic properties in their local communities. That’s very powerful.

How has blogging changed the way you think about communicating heritage?

First and foremost, I’ve learned that any issue benefits from communication. People have something to say and these issues shouldn’t be left to just “the experts” and the government. We all have a stake in preserving certain objects and areas, and really in determining what is worth preserving. I think most people are naturally interested in preserving certain aspects of history and will respond when they’re brought into the discussion early and often. There’s a lot of expertise out there that can be tapped into. Archaeologists and historians can’t cover the whole country, so we need to bring in the general public and let them contribute. I’ve learned a lot from commenters that you just don’t get from just talking to academics and such. It’s amazing how much you learn by just, you know, talking to each other.