Archaeology in Silicon Valley? What is that? Throwing on a pith helmet, brushing off a Palm Pilot Pro and holding it up to the light?"It's looking at the archaeology of now," says Finn. As in examining digital devices that seem to go from hot to obsolete in the course of a day or mining miles of computer code before it evaporates into the ether.
It turns out that Finn, who has been studying the valley for more than a decade, is among the scholars looking at "contemporary archaeology," a field fascinated by the artifacts of our everyday lives and what they mean to us today.
And it turns out Silicon Valley is an incredible place for those who want to analyze the here and now while it's still here now. Think of it this way, Finn says: It is one thing to unearth (even from a drawer) a microprocessor and note the intricate packaging involved in its design. It's another to be able to talk to the man who designed the packaging, as Finn did in the case of retired Intel (INTC) designer George Chiu. It's like finding a Ming potter to tell you how he made the vase you dug up.
Finn says of more traditional archaeology. "But, of course, you can't talk to the person. Whereas, with a person like George, I was able to ask, 'What's the packaging about?' I needed him to make it beautiful, make it interesting."
Archaeology has always been about how humans relate to their stuff, says Michael Shanks, a Stanford University archaeologist and director of the Stanford Archaeology Center's Metamedia Lab. What better place to study that than Silicon Valley, where we seem to constantly crave and accumulate more and more stuff? Understanding our relationship with our digital gizmos can help us understand why we value what we value -- which in turn can guide those working to develop even more things for us to crave.
Think of the dominance of iPods and iPhones. Do we love them because of their functionality, Shanks asks as we talk by phone. "Actually, the iPhone I'm talking on right now is damn crap as a phone," he says. "Does that mean I've given it up? No. Why? Because it's lovely, and I like stroking its back, and it looks gorgeous."
Finn, who is based in England and also works as a journalist, has been studying the valley for more than a decade. In 2001, as the dot-com boom was bursting, she published "Artifacts: An Archaeologist's Year in Silicon Valley," which looked at the valley as it was then. She's been making regular visits since. Now she's writing a chapter on the valley for the "The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World," a comprehensive volume planned for publication in 2013 by Oxford University Press.
Finn's challenge is writing about a place that is changing so quickly. Finn's advantage is her 10 years of archaeological observations, which give her a perspective on just how the place has changed. One of her early conclusions resonates with me. The dot-com bust, she says, gave valley residents a chance to slow down and reflect. The reflection has led to a certain nostalgia. Finn cites the rise of vintage computer collecting and the evolution of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View as evidence.
And the new nostalgia, she says, has led to a new anxiety. The wave of worry comes from "the acknowledgement that much of Silicon Valley's elan comes from the strong and household-name characters who forged it," she wrote in an early draft of her Oxford work. "The area is going through a time of change at the top."
Though she wrote the line before Apple (AAPL) co-founder Steve Jobs died, she says his death and the outpouring of spontaneous tributes illustrate the point. "Once you've got a pioneer like that dying, it marks the end of an era," she says. "He was quite a defining person, rather like a Roman emperor."
A Roman emperor, she says. And suddenly the whole notion of digging for archaeological truths in Silicon Valley makes much more sense.
"What I've always found so tantalizing about dealing with computer history is that you've got the people there who are watching an artifact become historical before their eyes."
"At the beginning, people didn't really know what history was about in Silicon Valley. Now I think people understand that you have to have a sense of history in order to have a sense of the future."
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