Modernism/modernity – an archaeological glossary

Winding up the paper with Bill Rathje and David Platt on the perfume of garbage. Here is something I wrote for the introduction to the special issue of Modernism/Modernity. We have outlined what may be called the duplicity of the archaeological object and have tracked aspects of some archaeological modernisms that work upon this duplicity,…

Three windows

A wonderful new project is on its way from Abram for our experimental work on cultural information and databases. It is a system that displays on your screen and records (for future playback) a random selection of three items (in three browser windows) from a cultural database such as our wiki Traumwerk. What associations will…

Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory

Conference – Bristol UK – encounters between past and present CHAT – Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory – great new project starting in a conference that wants archaeologists to think – archaeology merging more with the study of contemporary material culture. As long as it is realized that materiality only makes sense in terms…

archaeology needs bold science

A seminar with Bjørnar Olsen and and Chris Witmore at Stanford Archaeology Center. Our title Innocence regained? Is there a new consensus in archaeology? An alternative case for bold thinking. I wrote Social Theory in Archaeology and Reconstructing Archaeology back in the 1980s partly because I was so disenchanted with archaeological thinking – we wanted…

The illusions of VR

Lynn Meskell at Stanford telling us about her new technology project with Columbia computer scientists. High resolution laser survey/scanning produces 3D models of archaeological sites. They tried it at Monte Polizzo over the summer. The result – a textured wireframe model of one of the architectural features of this hill top settlement. As excavated by…