Gavin Lucas was with us this week, talking about archaeological fieldwork. He described to us how archaeologists use mimetic machines for copying the past into the present. This is how I would put it – At the heart of our archaeological interests is the archive – we collect, codify, make and manage inventories. It is…
ruins and remains
quotidian flux
Scanning the excellent detritus.net – dedicated to pratctices of recycling culture – I came across Mark Napier’s work. Barbie dolls (have a look!), found imagery in New York, and “negative space – an attempt to scan my entire appartment”. OK – it doesn’t get very far and is a little too whimsical for me, but…
Garbage – our most intimate relationship with the environment
Bill Rathje and I have a plan, a dream to create a center for garbology. Building on his twenty five years of sifting through garbage and digging land fill sites to show how wrong is our perception of discard and waste. Building on my obsession with matters archaeological. Not just garbage and rubbish. Everything from…
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…
the body and presence – uncanny things
What meaning cannot convey Two seven hundred year old mummies found in Peru – reported in the Sydney Morning Herald on 25 February [Link] A man of about 35 and a boy of 5. The man had one eye open and “you can see his eyeball. It’s perfectly preserved.” When the workers moved the body,…
horror and disclosure – a scene of crime clings to its past
A couple in the UK are suing their home’s former owners for not disclosing that the house had been the scene of a murder twenty years ago. [Link] Dr Samson Perera, a dental biologist at Leeds University UK, murdered his adopted daughter, Nilanthie, in 1985 and buried the dismembered body around the house and garden….