Prospective reflections on 2025-26 Acting with nature — prehistory My new book Archaeologies of Nature: Activating the Archive, written with Gabriella Giannachi, University of Exeter and Turin, is now complete and in production. Open Access — it will be available as PDF in June 2026. We use an archaeology of artworks to probe human relationships…
Bruno Latour
Applied Archaeology — Applied Humanities
Studio Michael Shanks Stanford University Newsletter 2024 Stanford Archaeology Center Archaeological mission and vision? Ivory tower as lighthouse? In a recent newsletter for Stanford Archaeology Center [Link] I talked of slow archaeology, of the benefits of long-running projects that afford time for unfolding reflection. Three interrelated projects remain ongoing. A kind of archaeological triptych. —…
A day for Chris Tilley: reflections on the performance of academic life
University College London November 15 2024. This morning I was online at a gathering of colleagues, friends, former students, to reflect upon the life and work of Chris Tilley who died earlier this year [Link]. Appreciative memories; what remains; hindsight and legacy; influences. There were the regular, standardized, and orthodox accounts of Tilley’s part in…
Update – the actuality of the archaeological past
I have contributed little to this site Since 2016. I have been writing (Greece and Rome: a new model of antiquity [Link]), running experiments in fieldwork (Project Borderlands [Link]), exploring applied archaeology (with a host of organizations and corporations), asking questions of the proper role of the academic, the researcher, the scholar. In this contemporary…
the culture of archaeology
Highway 128 Boonville California Since I moved to the United States a dozen years ago, I have spent a good deal of time in Northern California in a small back woods town called Boonville in the Anderson Valley on Route 128 as it makes its way to the Mendocino Coast. Always an agricultural community, logging,…
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