 Thank you very much, Albert, and thank you also to you and the Organising Committee at the EAA for inviting me to give this keynote here. Before I begin, I just want to perhaps preface my talk with a couple of disclaimers. The first is the subtitle to this talk, Creativity and Archaeological Interpretation, is perhaps a little bit of a misnomer. I probably should have called it Novelty in Archaeological Interpretation. Now, the difference is subtle, but at least to my ear, it's potentially quite crucial. And you'll see perhaps why that is as I proceed through my talk. The other thing I want to mention, and this is something that just occurred to me a few moments ago, perhaps rather stupidly of me, is that when you entitle a talk called Novelty in Archaeological Interpretation, there's a big burden on to actually say something novel. So, I've probably provided some rope to hang myself with here, but again, we'll see. I want to begin, though, with a little bit of a confession. I'm currently working on the preparation of a monograph for a large-scale excavation I conducted in the early 2000s. The site was a bishops residence in the south of Iceland, and although the site itself had its origins back in the 11th century, if not earlier, my main focus in the excavations was on the 17th and 18th centuries, which is also my main period of interest. Now, by Icelandic standards, this site was an impressive one. It had more than 30 buildings and around 70,000 finds, not including, of course, all the animal bones and other environmental remains. The preservation was also excellent on this site. Walls were shoulder high in places, and the organic remains from whole eggs to wood and leather. We had the whole cabang there. So, again, by Icelandic standards, this was an extremely rich dataset to work with in a country where the more usual lament is how few finds you recover from an excavation. Additionally, because of the time period we were working in, we had an extremely good documentary archive to triangulate against the archaeology. In other words, when it came to developing an interpretation for this site, I had no real excuses. This was as effectively as good as it gets in terms of data richness. And yet, yes, there was a little anxiety digging away at me. What the hell was I going to say? Why did we spend nearly 100 million Icelandic krona and 15 years working on this site and after the site on the archive? How do we do justice to this site? What is its story? Or perhaps better, what are its stories? And why do they matter? Now, of course, this is a question that concerns us all. Now, putting it like that, of course, it sounds like I went into the field without any clue what I was going to do. Perhaps that's partly true. We did have research designs. There was a whole series of conventional issues which we can, will and already have addressed with the site, some of which we've published in journals. Issues on masculinity and dress, on animal husbandry and enlightenment biology, on power and property. So, in formal terms, we're ticking all the right boxes. But it is, as we know, hard work, especially to try and say something we didn't already know, to tell a new story. And here I'm going to bring up that apocryphal statement by a historian that archaeology, or perhaps I should say historical archaeology, is an expensive way of telling us what we already know. Now, of course, archaeologists don't like that and we dismiss it for lots of good reasons. But at the same time, it should still haunt us all the time and remind us every time we begin some new research. And this is the source and the sense of my anxiety here, the burden of what we can call epistemic novelty. But it's not just what we know but how we come to know things. The question of epistemic novelty cannot be considered with also reflecting on how our knowledge content is related to knowledge practices and whether different modes of knowledge production can engender different kinds of knowledge. Of course, we know the answer to this already. It's very different, for example, reading a historical description of a site or some artifact from handling and physically engaging with that site or that object. And if we really want to turn the historian's accusation back on them, we might argue that what really distinguishes archaeology from history is that only one of these disciplines is constantly increasing its primary source material and an exponential rate. Hundreds of thousands of finds come out of the ground every year. How many new documents and manuscripts are discovered in comparison. But I'm not really interested in scoring points here. And in fact the tensions between history and archaeology or texts and things are not really productive or conducive to my argument. The only point really that matters here and the one I want to stress is this relation between epistemic novelty and our practices of knowledge production. It's important to pause and reflect a moment here on how we view knowledge production in archaeology. Because almost the sole focus during the latter half of the 20th century, at least within Anglo-American archaeology, was largely about epistemic strength, how one justifies or evaluates anarchological interpretation. From the hardline positivists of early processionalism to the softer hermeneutics of post-processionalism, including all those combative debates on relativism and pluralism, it was all in a sense about how to secure archaeological interpretation. Looking back and reflecting on my own epistemic concerns throughout my career as an archaeologist, and I'm talking about here about practicing archaeology rather than necessarily thinking or theorizing about it, I sometimes wonder if the whole thing was a gargantuan theatre of misdirection. Because when I do think about my own research, whether it's my doctoral studies or up to my current project on this site I've just been talking about, I don't think epistemic strength has really been a major concern. Of course I do reflect on the strength of my interpretation. I spend a lot of time working through evidence and a great deal of care goes into what Alice and Wiley and Bob Chapman have recently called evidential reasoning. And I want my arguments to be strong and robust, but somehow this is really never a great source of epistemic anxiety. No, what really keeps me awake at night, well perhaps not that much, is epistemic novelty saying something new. The theme of this conference is beyond paradigms and it's surely quite accurate to say that we are now in a post-paradigmatic era. If by paradigm we mean some kind of major theoretical position which claims a monopoly on the way archaeological interpretation should be conducted. The demise of all those debates on epistemic strength since the new millennium is linked to this shift. Although one senses of course that these issues are also potentially re-emerging, Chapman and Wiley's book, whom I just mentioned, is in the sense one symptom of this, but more generally the concerns around archaeological interpretation and new scientific data, especially ancient DNA, may suggest that such issues will gather force. But I want to resist this pull back into an issue that has already received more than its fair share of attention. Not because I don't acknowledge its importance, but because the issue of novelty really does bother me more and always has when it comes to the way I actually practice archaeology. So having staked out the ground of my topic, it's important now that I perhaps qualify what I define or define what I mean when I talk about epistemic novelty. But there's been some discussion of this issue recently by archaeologists and I'm going to single out here too, Arthur Rivera and Tim Flores Sorenson. I'm sorry for this but in a sense I'm doing it because they are the two who perhaps most recently engaged with this issue. But I'll come back to their arguments in a minute. But before we address that I think it's useful to just think about epistemic novelty in very general terms. And if we do that then archaeology is in many ways a paragon of one of the most central tropes of knowledge production in science, that of discovery. The notion of discovery is a rather complex one. And the English word at least has several different connotations to discover, come in to reveal or expose a state of affairs, as in she discovered that her phone wasn't working because the battery was dead. It conjures up in a sense these heidigerian notions of truth as disclosure or unconcealment. And the link to archaeology is obvious and suffires the conventional image of archaeological remains. Is there invisibility or concealment that the whole point of excavation is to disclose? And in popular imagination this uncovering might also be linked to a notion of recovering. Again we have this connection to lost cities and lost treasures. But to discover also means to find out something new, like seafarers discovering a new island or continent. Discovery is that moment of first sighting. It's this conjunction of something new with something understood or comprehended that the term discovery so aptly names and which is wired is a common trope in both archaeology and science in general. Discovery as the disclosure of new knowledge. To some extent this issue can be connected to the old positive notion of hypothesis formation or what Popper called the logic of discovery. But as we know on the whole positivists we're not that interested in this phase of the epistemic cycle but only in a rather rigorous programme of testing. Such hypothesis. Now archaeologists again like Tim Florenson and Marco Merilla have recently started to explore the status of hypothesis formation from a post-positivist angle particularly in relation to concepts such as speculation. And there is very deep connection between these notions of speculation and novelty. But at the same time coming up with a hypothesis or speculating about some state of affairs still begs the question what constitutes new knowledge. Every archaeological excavation unearths new finds, new features. But does this constitute new knowledge? This of course all depends on how you said it in the context of existing knowledge what to an undergraduate archaeologist appears new may not to a senior academic who has seen fashions come and go and even reappear. When a student on an excavation finds a decorated pottery shirt for example and feels a wave of excitement because it doesn't look like anything else she's found on site Professor might just flip it to one side because they've seen lots like it on other sites. Nobility is certainly relative. But because knowledge is a collective or social endeavour it's the disciplinary context of knowledge that can be taken to define novelty not that of any given individual. On the other hand even at a disciplinary level there may be no consensus on novelty simply because disciplinary knowledge itself is not a neat coherent system but a patchwork of different perspectives, problems and questions whose relevance may vary to different archaeologists. Let me return to excavation. There are many ways to claim novelty for your excavation. I know an archaeologist who on almost every dig announces to the media that they found the earliest this or the first known example of that and they may be right and using superlatives such as the oldest, the biggest, the first certainly a good way to get your site noticed. Funding bodies of course might be a bit more discerning but even they usually put a high value on originality and novelty. Trouble is they don't often define what that actually means and I've experienced this very recently when I put together any ERC application when novelty was a big, big issue but trying to navigate exactly what's involved in that concept is very, very tricky. Let me tell you a story which illustrates many of the issues I've just been discussing. In the early 1970s, probably the first major urban excavations took place in Reykjavik in Iceland led by the Swedish archaeologist Elsin Nordall. Apart from remains of an 18th century textile factory, the other major discovery and one that made the most headlines was the excavation of a Viking farm dating to the first decades of the settlement of Iceland, so talking about the late 9th century AD. Immediately speculation circulated about whether this was the home of the historical figure recorded in the written records Ingolfa Adnason. The archaeologists generally remained agnostic about this preferring to focus on the site as evidence of early settlers' pattern life ways and on the whole the discovery of the site matched the general expectations of the settlement patterns of Iceland being that of individual farmsteads. Viking Reykjavik in other words was no bustling emporia as seen at the foundation of many other urban excavations happening in Scandinavia at the same time. This was just a farm. Then, in 2002, archaeological excavations began on a plot adjacent to that from the 1970s and now a second Viking hall was discovered. Once again, media speculation flared up. Could this be the home of Ingolfa Adnason? How many houses does one guy need? Perhaps he was an early Viking property speculator. Once again, the archaeologists steared away from such issues focusing on the implications for settlement patterns. Certainly there were other cases of farms with two halls in Iceland so although unusual it was not that exceptional. But then, in 2007, a third hall was found and yes, you guessed it, Ingolfa Copsa yet again. But more seriously, the discovery of this site along with the other remains found earlier such as iron-working forges and so on from the same period have started to throw big question marks around what we think we know about the nature and density of settlement processes during the first centuries of Landam in Reykjavik. So what can we learn from this story? From one perspective, each site on its own did not produce anything new. All the buildings had a similar form and construction as seen on other Viking farmsteads previously excavated in Iceland and the same goes for the finds. Certainly each was unique in its own way and new in a sense but none of them really offered new kinds of buildings, new kinds of artefacts. Collectively, however, it was a different matter. As a group, they are redefining the type of settlement forms we are used to seeing in Iceland from the earliest centuries and in that sense new knowledge is surely emerging. It's in this sense that we might also suggest that archaeological excavation be viewed as a repeatable experiment. In Britain, at least, the idea of excavation as an unrepeatable experiment is a well-known trope and it was famously articulated by Philip Barker back in the 1970s, I think. It was meant to underline the fact that once you dig a site it's destroyed and you can't go back and do it again. Now, this isn't entirely true, of course. There are plenty of examples where archaeologists have gone back to re-excavator site and ended up reinterpreting it. The first excavation I did in Iceland was one of these, a Viking Hall originally dug in 1908. But Barker had a point, of course. Information is nonetheless lost and destroyed and in the case of the Viking site I dug critical abandonment deposits that could have helped with the phasing of the site were irrevocably gone. But in another sense, his analogy is somewhat missed the mark. No scientific experiments work on the same materials. Once you dissect a frog, you don't undisect it and start all over again. No, you grab a new frog. No two experiments are ever alike. Now one might object that this misses the point Barker was trying to make. When you take a new frog or a new batch of chemicals you're assuming for experimental purposes that they are the same since the kind of information you're seeking is common to all individuals. For Barker you cannot treat archaeological sites like frogs. Each is unique, has its own unique story to tell. But then of course this begs the question, how unique is this site? Returning to my example of Viking Halls in Reykjavik it was the repeatability of the experiment that allows for the generation of new knowledge. Because it establishes the possibility of comparison. Now this is an argument that Chris Evans has recently made in the context of development led archaeology in the United Kingdom. In an inversion of Barker's argument, Evans suggests that what archaeology needs is not flagship excavations, those big famous sites that become textbook exemplars or headline grabbers, but rather excavations viewed more like experiments. Rather than see each site as unique we need to see each site for what it reveals about broader patterns. Now I think this is an important argument but of course there's always the danger that it perpetuates a deep and long term division within archaeology between its status as a generalising versus a particularising science. Are we after the big picture, the common processes and patterns or is it the unique stories that ultimately matter? No doubt we need both. If we can learn anything here in relation to what counts as new knowledge is that sometimes it comes from new particulars, sometimes from new configurations of repeated particulars. The larger issue is how we might articulate such novelty in general terms. At a superficial level, one might say that the story of the Viking halls of Recuric which I just told illustrates a very traditional view of the growth of knowledge. The gradual accumulation of small discoveries on new facts leads to a fuller and more accurate picture of the past. A more sophisticated approach would argue following the work of Thomas Coon for example that this typical collection of routine data occasionally throws out anomalies. That second Viking hall was the first anomaly, the third, yet another. And this accumulation of anomalies starts to threaten the integrity of the reigning paradigm. In this instance, the one settler, one farm model, a settlement pattern for Iceland. For Coon, it was this accumulation of anomalies that resulted in paradigm shifts and ultimately scientific revolutions. I'm not claiming anything so grand in the case of the Recuric example. But arguably the same general structure is present here. We can observe it. Now Coon's account is in many ways, despite its age, one of the few to actually make epistemic novelty a centerpiece of his philosophy of science. It's the anomalies generated under conditions of normal science that define the conditions under which novel interpretation emerges. Under Coon's view, novelty then is by definition synonymous with paradigm shifts. And yet, now this is where the problem starts, because it's precisely the same conception that is landing us in trouble when we discuss novelty in archaeology. We might have abandoned the paradigm concept and embraced the idea that we're now in a post-paradigm era. Yet when we talk about novelty, it seems old habits die hard. This is very evident, and this is where I'm going to come back now to Arthur Ribeiro and Tim Flores Sorenson's works. This is very evident in Ribeiro's recent discussion of theoretical novelty that came out in the Archaeological Dialogs Journal, where he critiques this idea of the fetishisation of novelty. The new is the new normal, as he so nicely puts it. Now Ribeiro is quite explicit in linking this novelty to paradigmatic overhaul. But in having made that link, I think in the sense he sidestept what could have been a more fruitful discussion of novelty. When novelty is equated with paradigm change, it's difficult to disagree with his main argument, which is essentially to reject this urge for constantly changing our theoretical paradigms as often as we change our underwear. Of course, I'm with him on this, but at the same time, I'm not so sure contemporary theoretical novelty which he discusses can so easily be framed within this kind of Cunian model. This is the point that Tim Flores Sorenson comes back to in his paper on novelty in current Swedish archaeology. Like Sorenson, I don't see such contemporary theoretical innovations as normally calling for paradigm change, even if sometimes that has how they might appear. More worrying, though, is this explicit separation that paradigmatic view of theory makes between theoretical innovation on the one hand and empirical discovery. We don't have to accept Cunian model of science to acknowledge the more general point that theory and practice or theory and data are inextricably linked. In my earlier example of the Viking halls or the Viking farms of Reykjavik, the empirical discoveries and the theoretical innovation go hand in hand. The problem here may lie rather with what different archaeologists understand by the term theory, with some reserving it for those grand paradigmatic innovations, while others think of theory more as a way of thinking with archaeological sources. Indeed, the deep sensitivity to theory and its engagement with the empirical is precisely the point of what Björn Olsson and Torri Pettar's daughter have highlighted in their recent take on archaeological theory as theory adrift. And it's also something in a different way I've also tackled in my writings on mobility and knowledge. What is at stake here, I guess, is a morthing of what theory is, which can also be confused with what's been called the death of theory. Now I'm going to show a slide which might please some people, but I think it's actually a little more complicated. If you look at this chart you might assume that archaeological theory really is on the way out. It was a fashion that started in the 1960s since the new millennium has been going down. And we're all just getting back on doing archaeology again. But I think it's actually telling us something more subtle about the way theories increasingly becoming less specialised, less ghettoised topic separate from practice, from data empirical research or what have you, and something which is much more context and problem specific. Theory is much more embedded in the way we might think about or approach what the archaeological is. Now maybe theory is no longer the right word to describe this, but that is not the same thing it was arguing for the death of theory, which can be equally dangerous because this has also been aligned with the rise of big data and the emergence of data driven archaeology which to me sometimes threatens to take us back to some of the most naive forms of empiricism. In short, the danger of setting up a polarising model of epistemic innovation as either theoretical on the one hand or empirical on the other is that it fixes all discussion of novelty within two rather outmoded philosophies of science. On the one hand, innovation as empirical discovery takes us back to a precunian even prepositivist vision of scientific growth as the inductive accumulation of new facts. As each new fact is added, the total picture becomes clearer and clearer like the classic jigsaw metaphor criticised by archaeologists even back in the 1950s or to give it a more updated version for the digital era less pixelated sharper definition. A more sophisticated version of this model would give greater or equal weight to new kinds of facts made possible by new technologies, techniques and methods as suggested recently by Christian Christensen. The obvious example is being the impact of radiocarbon in the mid 20th century and the impact of ADNA today. Now both these innovations are clearly of huge importance and whether we want to call them revolutions or not, they have and will have a major influence on the development of technological knowledge. But to imply that these empirical or technologically driven discoveries are more important than theoretical innovations is to perpetuate a false and unnecessary dichotomy. The spate of first generation C14 dates certainly threw into question many of the accepted paradigms of European prehistory but it wasn't C14 dates that came up with the new interpretations to accommodate this change and the same will apply to ADNA. But there is an equal danger in arguing that such new dates act like cwnian anomalies prompting a theoretical revolution. This is the precisely the notion of epistemic novelty which Ribera rightly criticises where all important changes come from condu conceptual paradigms. In other words it's this whole seesaw dynamic of the theoretical and the empirical which always seems to drag debate down into either or positions where epistemic novelty either comes from the empirical discovery or theoretical innovation. So the question is how can we try and move away from this somewhat dangerous state of affairs. I think one of the first things we should do is to focus move away from a focus on where epistemic innovation occurs i theory or data and rather reflect more generally on the conditions under which it happens. Epistemic novelty is distributed across all the agents in an archaeological situation the people, the instruments as well as the stuff we dig up. Here following a trajectory developed in science studies contemporary philosophy of science like Hans Jorgreinberger have highlighted the whole experimental system in their discussion of epistemic novelty and seen new knowledge emerging from the interaction between technical equipment and the objects of study. Now that's rather abstract so let me return to the issue of archaeological excavation as a repeatable experiment to try and illustrate what I mean here. In my earlier discussion the repeatability of the experiment seemed to rest solely on the recognition that sites can somehow be treated as equivalent like our experimental frogs. It's from this presumption of equivalence that similarities and differences start to become meaningful but this of course is a one-sided representation of the experimental setup. Equivalence is not just a presumption made about objects of study it's something the experimental apparatus itself helps to create. Scientists don't just experiment on any frogs or mice or fruit flies more commonly. They experiment on laboratory bread organisms one that have been highly modified through breeding to conform to the experimental setup. They're constructed. Now in archaeology we don't control our sites in quite the same way as biologists control their specimens but the way we excavate a site does affect the way the site appears. Just look at the differences between using single context for example versus planar methods of excavation. We control our excavation methods so that as much as possible the same techniques are used in order to make the sites look comparable. There's a reason so many site plans look like they could be the same site because they're produced under conditions which are meant to generate some degree of equivalence. Excavation methods and tools constitute a mobile laboratory an attempt to bring some of that control into the wild. Moreover it's this mutually constitutive relationship between what Ryan Berger calls the epistemic thing and the technological object i.e. the stuff we dig up and the way we do it or in this case between the archaeological remains and the excavation apparatus it's this that generates novelty. This is something that Matt Edgeworth has brought out beautifully in a 2012 paper called Follow the Cut that appeared in Norwegian Archaeological Review where he focuses on the power of artifacts and features to generate interpretation through the material properties and affordances they offer in their interaction with archaeologists and their tools. Indeed much of the new work under this banner of a return to things has emphasised the potency of things to surprise and explicitly develop new modes of interaction with these things to cultivate such novelty. Here again I can refer back to the work of my colleagues like Fiona Olson and Thore Pettisdottar as well as the work of Chris Whipmore. Now of course one doesn't need to follow what some will consider these radical directions in order to perceive that the modes of interaction are central to this issue of novelty. We must consider as many different dimensions of any given archaeological situation as possible. Not just the equipment and the remains being unearthed, but also all the people and things that may be conventionally seen as peripheral or irrelevant to the archaeological context. Again I'm now going to go back to the example of my Viking farms in Reykjavik to illustrate what I mean here. One of the key features of this story was that the empirical evidence seems to stack up as a series of anomalies and this much seems to conform to a Cunian view of science. But there is more than anomaly going on here. The second and then the third farms were not just anomalous with respect to existing knowledge. They were also unexpected. They were a surprise. How did this come about? In the case of the discovery of the second farm given its location very close to that excavated in the 1970s there was at least some expectation of further Viking remains, outhouses or other contemporary features even if no one expected to find another Viking hall. In the case of the third hall there was not even any expectation of Viking remains at all except in the most vagus senses that it could be possible there could be something there. We just don't know. The question is how do we understand such surprises? Do we just relegate them to random chance to luck serendipity accompanying any act of excavation? Or come we use this as a way to reflect more broadly on epistemic novelty. This is where the wider context of these excavations really start to matter. None of these were research excavations but rather work done ahead of urban development. These sites were dug because someone wanted to build a hotel on these plots. Now this non-archeological reason for digging a site can of course sometimes be frustrating but at the same time in injecting an element of chance into the archaeological process it also created the conditions for new knowledge. The philosopher of science Mary Morgan has suggested that what defines epistemic novelty in experimental situations is not only this issue of anomaly as Coon pointed out but also this element of surprise that certain results were both confounding but also unexpected. Thinking then about the conditions under which epistemic novelty emerges as the conjunction of what we might call surprise and confoundment. It's a very useful starting point but since the notion of anomaly or confoundment has already been well treated not least by Coon himself it's this other notion of surprise that I want to focus mostly on here. And as the example of the Reykjavik Viking Hall show development led archaeology is very good at throwing up surprises. I'm certainly not suggesting of course that surprise is absent from research led excavations. One of the drills of any excavation is that no matter how much background research and preparation you've done you can never be quite sure what the earth will turn up as you put your spade and trowel into the ground. Every excavation contains that seed of excitement and anticipation of the unexpected. But what I do want to suggest is that when the conditions for choosing a site are non-archaeological they actually increase the likelihood of surprise and consequently confoundment not being framed by the research tradition with all its prior assumptions and expectations. There's an element of truth that I'll old saying I'll only find what you're looking for. And this is in a way very nicely illustrated by Richard Bradley's now more than 10 year old synthesis of British prehistory based on the collation of decades of development led archaeology in the United Kingdom. The data from which still lay largely latent in the great literature of technical reports most of which was unpublished. Now in part, for Bradley this was about writing a textbook that needed updating with new examples that reflected all the work in commercial archaeology and that did not trot out all the same old sites. But in part it was also about the new picture of prehistory that was emerging through the sheer mass and sheer scale of excavation that was only possible under development led conditions. Indeed it's in issues of scale that such work has perhaps had its greatest impact. Few of any research excavations have ever had the resources or even the audacity to strip hectares of land. This is landscape archaeology through excavation not field survey as it's been conventionally been done. And when you do this new things are bound to emerge. In the context of the UK work one of the most well known is the realisation that Bronze Age field systems in lowland Britain were not isolated phenomena in certain locales but far more extensive and common is the work of people like David Yates has shown. But it's not just the ubiquity of Bronze Age field systems in the UK that development led archaeologies revealed but again as Chris Evans has pointed out this is just simply far more archaeology out there than we had originally envisaged. One of the drives behind the emergence of rescue archaeology in the 1970s and the whole preservation movement that has now become standardised legislation across most of Europe was the threat of development to what was perceived to be a finite and scarce resource. Finite perhaps it still is or even that's debatable depending on how you define it. But if the path 50 years of development led excavation reveals anything as far from scarce but in fact incredibly abundant. It's the interpretive implications of this settlement density that should make us sit up and pay attention and how it ought to impact the kind of stories we tell as Evans has put it our interpretive framework needs to catch up with the challenge of this data and one of these challenges is to rethink the mechanisms and speed for example of cultural transmission or diffusion in a landscape far more densely occupied than previously imagined. Now so far I've drawn almost all my examples of novelty from field discoveries particularly excavation and one of course might think in doing so I've only lent weight to the empiricists argument and the idea that new knowledge really actually does just come from new empirical findings whether new data or new kinds of data. It's thus very important now that I balance the scales and show how the same kind of approach looking at the element of surprise and conditions under which epistemic novelty can emerge applies equally to cases of what we might call theoretical innovation. However if this division between empirical and psychological novelty still seems to shadower my account I really is something I'm trying to break down and I hope that my next examples will start to demonstrate that and show the relevance of that division. My next story crosses the Atlantic and comes from Matthew Lieberman who's an archaeologist based in the US who's worked a lot on post-colonial issues in archaeology. And in this particular instance I want to talk about his collaboration with an indigenous native tribe in the south west. Now this is a pretty random example there's no special reason for choosing this one except that it happened to come to my attention. Now this tribe approached Lieberman with the idea of getting help and understanding the ancestral use of a particular site a particularly important cultural locale. It sounded great there's only one problem archaeologically the area was almost a void with the exception of a few lithic scatters. How on earth was he going to bring anything to the table? But as it turned out it was actually quite emancipating. Lieberman used surface collections of obsidian lithics and XRF analysis to provenance them and revealed the predominance that of one source of obsidian over four others a predominance which had no relation to quality or proximity to source but rather spoke of the special cultural meanings which must have attached to the one select source. Now this may not sound like a great discovery but for the tribe it was of major significance and for Lieberman it was revelatory about knowledge production and here I want to quote his own words and they really sum up nicely what I want to say he says saying yes to this collaboration forced me to put aside my own agenda and commit myself to the tribe by dedicating myself to research serving the needs of others I'd open the door to worlds of knowledge that I never would have known existed and forced myself to learn things I'd never would have dared to learn on my own. This last example was also a case involving fieldwork and new empirical discoveries but in this case the surprise and empirical novelty came from an archaeologist working with an indigenous community whose interests were somewhat different to the archaeologist once again here is an example of a nonarchaeological agenda impacting archaeological research in an innovative way but unlike the case of development led archaeology where the reasons for choosing sites can be separated from the subsequent work done on the site here they cannot what all might call the theory behind site choice and excavation strategy was integral to the discoveries and it was precisely the collaboration between archaeologists with their own stock of knowledge and indigenous people with different stocks of knowledge that created the conditions for new knowledge to emerge and this is really quite important because so often that one sees epistemologists lashing whereas here it's actually the productive potential of epistemologists coming together and what they can generate now the example of indigenous and collaborative archaeology illustrates aboard a picture here about the benefits of multi-vocality and diversity in archaeological practice what Peter Schmidt and Alice Kehoe call archaeologists of listening because you don't have to work in indigenous context to exploit these conditions everyone has diverse experience and perspectives which can either be ignored or listened to dimensions of gender, sexuality, ethnicity religion, disability all these among a field team or archaeological community can all function as ways to stimulate the unexpected if you let them and in university context this can and should be treated as a resource as several scholars have pointed out like Janis Amalakus, Hannah Cobb Karen Croucher for example encouraging students to play an active role in research designs and on-site interpretation can create better conditions for epistemic innovation and if a teacher simply tells them what to dig and what it all means now most academics recognize this certainly often when they're acknowledging their students in publications when they get aired in the context of a course or a class but these things still often get relegated to the acknowledgments here I'm reminded of the work of Jacques Rancier and his book The Ignorant Schoolmaster there's a paragon of this this book came out in the wake of 68 and it argued for a new style of pedagogy one where intellectual equality between the teacher and the student was assumed as a starting point not the end now in a sense this might seem paradoxical to the whole point of pedagogy as usually conceived in the sense that the teacher is supposed to know more than the pupil and that the job of the teacher is to facilitate the education of the student and of course you can couch it in all kinds of contemporary language about environment learning based teaching and so on but the basic issue is often not really addressed here and doesn't go to the point of Rancier's argument such humility can and more commonly of course is extended to one's peers and other disciplines but the implications remain the same one of the benefits of university institutions is that they gather scholars of very different interests together even if sometimes the same institutions encourage compartmentalisation and make it harder for cross-disciplinary dialogue but transgressive collaborations have always been with us whatever label we choose to put on them inter-disciplinary, multi-disciplinary, post-disciplinary the details of these labels are perhaps not as important as the general spirit behind them the fact that disciplines do benefit from talking to each other borrowing or sharing ideas techniques and even data some of the great scientific innovations were made by scholars moving from one discipline to the other or importing a method or technique used in one field to another the molecular biologist Linus Pauling who is essential to laying the foundations and the discovery of the helical structure of DNA began his career studying crystals as a chemist the first cloud chambers to track atomic particles were derived from earlier meteorological equipment to measure dust particles in the atmosphere endless other examples these kinds of crossovers are what philosopher of science Peter Dalt Gallison designated as trading zones and they are often one of the most primary sources for innovation whether that is theoretical, empirical or methodological indeed under the current highly specialised environment and fragmented nature of science today these are also the primary spaces across which communication takes place and through which knowledge between domains can travel now at this point perhaps somewhat ironically I feel like I'm not really saying anything new this is where I provided the rope to hang myself with these epistemic advantages of pluralism have been well established for a long time now especially through feminist and decolonising epistemologies linked to standpoint theory and so on but the issue here I want to stress is really the connection between the function of epistemic pluralism and epistemic novelty and that's how what might seem like quite different practices of things like developer-led archaeology indigenous and collaborative archaeology or even archaeological pedagogy actually share a recurrent underlying thread share the same propensity to generate surprise and novelty what is relevant here is that novelty comes not from data or theory but from certain kinds of situation which encourage the unexpected and these are the situations precisely where archaeology is least quarantined in its own world but exposed to the effects and agences of other non-archaeological influences whether that's someone wanting to build a hotel or an indigenous community with its own questions and concerns about its heritage it could also come from something as simple as reading outside your own area of interest perhaps the best piece of advice I've ever received from my own teachers is certainly to read around my subject to not feel guilty about taking time to read books and papers that may have absolutely nothing to do with archaeology or my research and then again this is not something most of us don't already know or practice to varying degrees but I think it deserves repeating and underlining incredibly fertile ideas can come from the juxtaposition of two seemingly unrelated disciplines or fields of research and as one kind of topical example of this I want to briefly mention Einstein as probably many of you might have done I visited Einstein's house during this conference and this of course was the apartment where Einstein wrote several of the most key theoretical papers while he was working for the patent office here in Berlin now what's often interesting about this situation is the kind of absurdity of the juxtaposition of this genius theoretical papers emerging from the context when someone is working in a patent office and I guess we kind of marvel at that juxtaposition of the absurdity of it but what's interesting is to really reflect on what actually impact that context had on Einstein's ideas this of course is something we can really only speculate on but again if I can return to the philosophy of science Peter Gallison he's basically suggested that it was actually sifting through those patents day in day out that provided a primary crux of creativity for Einstein reading patents on clocks and time measuring devices patents on electrical instruments and so on that kind of work fed into and helped to gender some of his ideas this is not something we can ever demonstrate since Einstein of course never really recorded what he did in the patent office in Berlin we don't really know what patents he looked at but as an idea I think it's very provocative to think about that think about the context what a situation that is completely unrelated to what he ended up doing what impact that might have had and for me I sense this is the ultimate justification for all that theorising in archaeology that some people find so abhorrent we may dislike the rhetoric that it's sometimes couched in we may find it's style, sometimes pompous and self-serving but for all its flaws I truly believe it does an archaeology a great service it constantly creates a space for epistemic innovation even if in itself it might not seem that innovative but more importantly in terms of the work it does it's no different to the development of new techniques and methods that are constantly being tested in archaeology or the ever-growing mountain of data we accumulate every year for every radiocarbon and ancient DNA revolution there are 100 other methodological or technical failures that never quite meet their promise for every new hominin fossil or Viking hall that breaks the received orthodoxy there are hundreds and thousands of finds that really don't tell us anything we didn't already know we should not expect theoretical production to be any different now it may seem from having placed the weight of epistemic innovation in the earlier part of my talk on new data and new discoveries I'm now swinging the other way and putting greater stress on theory or ideas borrowed from other disciplines or fields of activity but what these situations share that I want to emphasise here the issue is not so much about discovering new data or borrowing ideas but encouraging the permeability the inherent permeability of any archaeological situation to allow for surprise confoundment and even contradiction whether it's an archaeological feature that doesn't do what it's supposed to do a contractor with no interest in archaeology but who wants to build a hotel or an indigenous community on the land and heritage what all these have in common is this element of surprise now of course having these conditions in place still no guarantee that new knowledge will emerge indeed a doubt is anything we could do to guarantee such an outcome but then maybe that's precisely the point such uncertainty is an essential factor and what underlies the whole notion of the unexpected thank you