Earlier today I mentioned an abhorrent positivity in those archaeologies that see the past as mirror to the present and ignore the mess and suffering of history. Here are some comments of mine on negative archaeology from an article with Bill Rathje and David Platt that is about to appear in the journal Modernism/Modernity. It…
ruins and remains
everyday mess
Philip has pointed me at blather – an extraordinary concatenation of fragments of text – the remains of thoughts, imputed conversation, remarks, ruminations, pontifications – the mess of everyday discourse … As Philip puts it Basically, you take a dictionary and throw out the definitions. Then you let everybody define the words themselves. Then make…
photoblogs
Archaeology shares a great deal with photography. Particularly time and a temporality of actuality. Here is how I descibe it in my wiki entry on the archaeological (also mentioned on 10 December). Four archaeological temporalities: Recollection It is not only that archaeologists gather fragments and build collections. Like memory, the work of archaeology is re-collection…
how the copy constitutes the original
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…
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…