Introduction

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General

It is more than paying tribute to convention when we say that an archaeological project is essentially cooperative – all the more so at Mozan, where such collaboration rests on well defined theoretical presuppositions and is explicitly indicated for every contribution, however small.

Here, I wish to briefly explain what these presuppositions are, and to define the tasks that characterize the individual involvement of each staff member.

The issue is particularly complex in terms of how credit is to be assigned within the final publication, especially so for excavation unit books. Much thought has gone into this issue, and this page provides a review of our overall final choices.

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Significance of teamwork

Team work is an essential dimension of archaeological field work anywhere. On the human level, this is one of the aspects that makes the excavation experience unique, because there is a very close, direct and continuous interaction among all members working and living together, in close quarters and with an intense sense of partecipation in the project.

The resulting human and professional dynamics shapes in some unique ways all aspects of work and life in the field:

• the strategy decisions that propel the course and conduct of the excavation in its most physical aspects;
• the intellectual confrontation between the stratigraphy of one’s own narrow lcoalized perspective and the larger picture emerging daily from the ground all around you;
• the way in which different typological analyses cause constant realignment in patterns of thought; and of course
• the human dimension of dealing with the personalities, congenial or otherwise, who are behind the variegated expressions of professional conviction and temperamental biases.

In Mozan all of this is heightened by the fact that all work done is expected to be immediately “public,” and hence fully shared. There are no private notebooks, and everyone bears a direct responsibility for every observation made, and for its pertinent record. There can be tension, but there is mostly a sense of communal accomplishment, that generates pride in contributing to the emerging whole and confidence in relying on others to do the same.

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The posture of the digital author

There seems to be an ingrained, if somewhat undefinable, negative attitude towards digital “authoring,” on the psychological level. I will mention here a few of the factors that appear to be operative in generating this attitude – and I am talking obviously not of electronic versions of linear “papers” (whether these are originally on paper or published from scratch as electronic files):

1. It is seldom, if ever, that one finds the first person used by the author, except in autobiographical web pages.
2. There is a strong underlying suspicion that the medium will have no permanence.
3. There is an equally strong underlying suspicion that there will be no readers, but only users.
4. It is also felt that those readers who are most important for one’s academic career, the ones on advancement committees, will share the lack of interested critical judgment that is felt to be innate to the readership at large.

To some extent, these negative feelings are borne out of what I perceive to be the lack of properly digital thought and corresponding digital narrative. A goal of the Urkesh Global Record is to address precisely this issue, not only in proposing the theoretical concept, but especially in developing a concrete implementation of at least one type of properly digital scholarly medium. This is in the belief that to change the posture of the readers we must first change the posture of the author (see also my observations abut an author’s intent).

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Unit books and other books

The notion of teamwork applies epsecially to the digital books dedicated to the excavation units: here the number of participants in the epistemic process is very extensive, and crediting becomes correspondingly more complex. Accoridngly, we will treat these two tyoes of digital books seaprately.