Lunch with Jonathan Greenberg today – Stanford Law School. He specializes in conflict resolution and has a particular interest in national partition in the wake of the withdrawal of imperial powers and decolonisation – Korea, India, Palestine, Vietnam, and, of course, Iran and Iraq. He sees partition and the narratives and feelings it generates as…
archaeology
the uncanny preservation of curse-laden mummies
archaeological archetypes Daily Telegraph | News | Ice Maiden triggers mother of all disputes in Siberia This story has it all. High in the Altai mountains of southern Siberia, where Shamans still practise their ancient rites and most people are descended from Asiatic nomads, there is a whiff of revolt in the air. Local officials,…
archaeology and modernism
Modernism/Modernity, Volume 11, 2004 – Archaeologies of the Modern – a special issue of the journal has just appeared. All about archaeology in the modern world. Jeffrey Schnapp, Matthew Tiews and I edited the volume – we are quite proud of the result.
archaeology-performance
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.
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…