Quotes from this article:

Anecdotally, there have been an abundance of punks employed in contract archaeology in the last forty years. Field archaeology traditionally relies on highly-skilled workers who accept low wages, unreliable hours and marginal living conditions who can also live and work communally (Morgan and Eddisford in press). While not all field archaeologists are punks, there is a relatively high acceptance of non-conformist dress and behavior in the commercial archaeological community.

The dress code part feels really superficial, especially for something written in 2015. Case in point, a lot of places that paid trash started relaxing dress codes. It's likely that a lot of them were doing so in order to "build solidarity" with the workers and "show them some autonomy" in spaces where it was decreasing.

The same is true of teaching; a lot of schools have relaxed dress code standards (for teachers) and have started making it possible for people with visible tattoos and piercings (to an extent) to participate in the field.

This doesn't mean, of course, that these people are "non-conformist" with regards to common social structures, politics, or institutions. There are a number of, for example, tattooed people who are on the far-right.


Similarly, Theresa Kintz’s The Underground, a radical zine published in the 1990s identified key issues for archaeological excavators, particularly low pay and high turn-over, and the classification of archaeological field work as undisciplined, performed by an alcoholic, childlike, “field animal” (Underground 1995; McGuire and Walker 1999).


A current equivalent to these past zines is The Diggers Forum, a publication from a Special Interest Group of the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists with practical, yet political articles for “diggers” edited by London archaeologists. A recent issue of The Diggers Forum covered pay minimas for archaeologists (Harward 2014), how teeth are used in bioarchaeological analyses (Lanigan 2014), and the academic and professional divide and its impact on archaeological training (Everill 2014). While punks were generally accepted in developer-funded archaeology, a coherent, academic punk archaeology was not forthcoming until the 2013 “Punk Archaeology” conference organized by William Caraher in North Dakota. Even amidst other archaeologies of resistance and efforts to advance a more activist archaeology, punk archaeology is underutilized as a productive structure for bringing together disparate communities of practice in archaeology.


In the Punk Archaeology publication following the conference, William Caraher defines punk archaeology as a reflective mode of organizing archaeological experiences, one that celebrates DIY practices, reveals a deep commitment to place, embraces destruction as a creative process and is a form of spontaneous expression (2014:101-102).


There are many biographies, histories and ethnographies of punk rock (for some of these, see Laing 1985; Sabin 1999; Shank 1994), but the cultural legacies of punk rock and the mobilization of punk as a means of knowledge production has come only as punks have infiltrated the upper echelons of academia.

Sorry, what? No, I really have to disagree with this because most of the punk-to-academia pipeline has actually resulted in many former radicals becoming part of the institutions they originally rallied against. It's much the same as what happened with the student and youth movements, which had also been tied to many punk scenes. A lot of people in those spaces realised they could build careers from their movement work and did that instead.

Institutionalising knowledge (and allowing it to be institutionalised) has done nothing valuable for us, especially from people who understood DIY and punk scenes.


Other contributions to Punkademics note the friction of subscribing to an anti-authoritarian, punk ethos while operating within a hierarchical bureaucracy, yet also identify critical pedagogy as a means toward liberation from capitalism and corporate globalization (Miner and Torrez 2012; Haenfler 2012).

How... does this make sense, especially considering people within the realm of critical pedagogy have directly called out other so-called "critical educators" for applying a label to themselves to do nothing but careerism? Like... even if I may have some issues with Macedo, check his intros to the 50th anniversary edition of Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Pedagogy of Freedom.

The hierarchical bureaucracy pushes people out unless they toe the line, and they will even close down radical seminars in the event that someone passes away (Freire) instead of hold them in his honour and bring in other critical pedagogues.

Like, if you're a punk or anarchist in academia, you should be working on breaking down the walls, not hiding behind them.


Beyond a critical pedagogical stance, the attitude and sensibility of punk can be productively used to regenerate and energize academic research (Beer 2014).

It could be, but I'm not seeing these things in academia. In fact, we've been seeing the total opposite happening. There are only small pockets (usually of individuals) doing this kind of work.

I'd love to highlight the irony that this person is associated with the ARG in Loughborough University and while the group they're most associated with outside of both does small useful aid? The ARG does little, if anything, to break down the walls that exist within academia. (This is also still true, even if they participate in groups outside... unless they're expropriating resources and making all information free-to-access or helping build grants for students who want to make their work open access... but they're not.)


This inner paradox is playful, complex, and resists simple classification, a slipperiness that should be familiar to archaeologists.

Familiar to people who frequently classify things they don't understand as related to religion, even without evidence? Okay.


Jim Groom, frustrated by the limited capabilities of educational and professional software content management systems coined the term edupunk in May 2008 to encompass an alternative methodology of using social networking sites and other internet resources to build a distributed, interactive and flexible platform for teaching, research, and collaboration.

A lot of teachers and academics did this, especially as groups were provided. CMS started to build up "safe" platforms for students (such as Edmodo) as early as 2008, and it was one of the most flexible for corporate-promoted.

Yet, a lot of social media platforms got in on the game and started working to develop CMS/LMS. Google's best known for both creating Google Classroom and acquiring Blogspot.

What's fun, though, is how often academics overlook what primary and secondary teachers are doing; a lot of what they do in their classes actually starts with us, but they seem to ignore us entirely because they think we're not on their level.


Yet these engagements are limited—edupunk specifically addresses digital technology within a higher education classroom.

This limitation is both unnecessary and self-imposed, but sure. (Academics aren't very creative, even when engaging with creative structures.)


The investigation of punk spaces as anti-heritage, sites of rebellion, ruin, of temporal remixing and nostalgia reveals the productive, provocative, instability of a punk archaeology.

This would've been the more interesting area of discussion.


While experimental archaeology has long been a method of investigating the materiality of the remains of the past, it is rarely tied to a political archaeology. The more radical experiments, including James Deetz's re-envisioning of living history museum Plimoth Plantation as an archaeological laboratory, hinted at this potential—there were complaints of the barefoot hippies that replaced the prim pilgrim ladies surrounded by antiques (Snow 1993).

Excuse me, you think that Plimoth Plantation is radical? Like, they are the most sanitised version of colonisation, and... you call them radical? This news article came out in 2020, highlighting all the ways in which that statement is absolutely laughable.

It may have been experimental (especially for a museum), but it was most certainly not radical.


The basic principles of punk archaeology reflect an anarchist ethos: voluntary membership in a community and participation in this community. Building things–interpretations, sites, bonfires, earth ovens, Harris Matrices–together. Foregrounding political action and integrity in our work. It is the work of the punk archaeologist to “expose, subvert, and undermine structures of domination...in a democratic fashion” (Graeber 2004:7).

Here's a thing left unaddressed in any area of this article: Who is doing the "building" and "interpreting?" There is little discussion about the seeming lack of Indigenous people who are disproportionately impacted by modern archaeology (and anthropology), especially across the Americas. This is most certainly true with regards to the thousands of unmarked graves found only in Canada and the fact that there are going to be vultures dressed as "helpful excavation companies" looking to make profit on their suffering.

Where is that discussion? Why isn't it discussed? Why do you overlook that and not even mention it in a few of your sentences?


To realize this praxis we must engage in what Orton-Johnson (2014) terms “small-citizenship”--small-scale, local projects and their accompanying online spaces that enable participants to feel a sense of connection to their community and to the past, with especial attention to marginalized and disenfranchised peoples.

Oh, oops. I should've read to the end for the one whole afterthought sentence. Great work!