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…
ruins and remains
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…
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,…