The Annotated Archive. Marginalia and Meaning in Following Pots

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As curated spaces, archives and their archivists are rarely neutral, which can result in exclusions, gatekeeping, and prejudices. Archives are filled with annotations: embellishments, marginalia, postscripts, side notes, and underlined passages. These extra-textual additions can influence the researcher, but they can also provide a greater understanding of scholarly developments, reader responses, and hidden agendas, all of which help us to interpret the past. Using archival resources and ethnographic interviews we trace how pots from Early Bronze Age (c. 3600–2000 bc) sites along the Dead Sea Plain in Jordan move, to reconstruct the pathways to their current locations and to gain insights into the history of archaeological practice in the region. Through an investigation of power in archival materials and repositories, we are examining the annotations to archival documents and looking at marginalia for meaning in following pots.