Kelly E. McClinton

About

Research interests: historical anthropology; anthropology of documents and archives; anthropology of science and technology; archaeology and material culture; heritage and museums; contested heritage; anthropology of Christianity; the nineteenth century. Regions: Italy and the Mediterranean; Britain; the United States.

In a storage room near the Basilica of Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Rome, archaeologists' field notebooks are stacked from floor to ceiling. Their cramped pencil entries hold site sketches and supply lists, missing finds and misreadings, hopes, and sometimes the names of the foremen and labourers who did the digging. Much of it has never been published. During my doctoral research, an archivist there taught me something I have not stopped thinking about: what is uncatalogued, or hard to read, tends to go unasked. The archive does not simply store the past; its routines decide which questions about the past can be posed.

My thesis, Excavating the Archives, examines the interpretative and methodological processes involved in clerical excavations at three sites in Rome between 1857 and 1949: Santi Giovanni e Paolo, San Clemente and San Pietro in Vaticano. The history of excavation at these basilicas was bound up with the Church's sociopolitical and ideological agenda in the nineteenth century, and with the new Italian state, which took the city in 1870 and promoted a 'classical' Rome in place of a 'Christian' one. What often fell outside such divides were quotidian structures such as housing, shops, baths and storage, many of which lay beneath the basilicas. The thesis traces how initial site narratives became ideologically embedded, and their impact on interpretation to date, through a longue durée examination of each site as an archaeological and historical palimpsest.

Rome is where these strands meet most sharply. Its early Christian sites are at once excavations, places of worship and tourist destinations, so the same remains are read as relics by pilgrims, as evidence by archaeologists and as heritage by visitors. AI tools now promise to open archives like the one on the Caelian to anyone with a question. I want to ask not only what such tools do to the authority to interpret the past, but how they might be designed to keep the archive's silences visible rather than smooth them over. ArchAI, which I built in response, attributes each claim to its author and treats every suggestion as a proposal until a person confirms it. I come to that work as one of its builders, and I treat that role as an object of analysis rather than a neutral vantage point.

I grew up in rural Arkansas, far from the nearest art museum, and do not assume that access is automatic.