Alessandra (Lopez Y Royo) and I have teamed up to make her web site on archaeology and performance more available, and to develop it. It went public this week at archaeology-performance.net. All sorts on performance, performativity, documentation, archaeological materialites.
archaeology
presence and liveness
Sepp’s book (see yesterday) has got me thinking again about presence and liveness. It is that temporal issue at the heart of archaeological experience – being there, in the presence of the past. Mike Pearson and I circled around this in our long collaboration on theatre/archaeology. A label we adopted because it suggests associations, rather…
new guide to the discipline
Just out – Blackwell’s Companion to Archaeology. An academic guide. I did the chapter on politics and archaeology. The argument is the one I first made back in the 1980s, when it was deeply unfashionable, that archaeology is a contemporary project, and archaeologists don’t discover the past, they work on what is left. Here is…
Bourdieu’s habitus
I finished a short piece last night on Bourdieu and his concept of habitus – for the new Routledge Key Concepts in Archaeology . OK a key concept, in some ways, for recent social archaeology. (In some ways, becuase many don’t make open reference to the concept, though they are influenced by it and its…
Ben Cullen
Ben Cullen died eight years ago today in Cardigan, Wales. He was only 31. He had the same birthday as my daughter Molly; died on my parents wedding day. He was a great friend. Ben’s big idea was that biological organisms and things are not always as radically different as we usually hold. Viral phenomena…
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…