Archaeologies of Presence


Book Description

The essays in this book seek to explore how the performance of presence can be understood through the relationships between performance theory and archaeological thinking. They ask questions such as: How presence is achieved through theatrical performance? What makes memory come alive? Where does perfomance practice and its documentation begin?




Archaeologies of Indigenous Presence


Book Description

Highlighting collaborative archaeological research that centers the enduring histories of Native peoples in North America Challenging narratives of Indigenous cultural loss and disappearance that are still prevalent in the archaeological study of colonization, this book highlights collaborative research and efforts to center the enduring histories of Native peoples in North America through case studies from several regions across the continent. The contributors to this volume, including Indigenous scholars and Tribal resource managers, examine different ways that archaeologists can center long-term Indigenous presence in the practices of fieldwork, laboratory analysis, scholarly communication, and public interpretation. These conversations range from ways to reframe colonial encounters in light of Indigenous persistence to the practicalities of identifying poorly documented sites dating to the late nineteenth century. In recognizing Indigenous presence in the centuries after 1492, this volume counters continued patterns of unknowing in archaeology and offers new perspectives on decolonizing the field. These essays show how this approach can help expose silenced histories, modeling research practices that acknowledge Tribes as living entities with their own rights, interests, and epistemologies. Contributors: Heather Walder | Sarah E. Cowie | Peter A Nelson | Shawn Steinmetz | Nick Tipon | Lee M Panich | Tsim D Schneider | Maureen Mahoney | Matthew A. Beaudoin | Nicholas Laluk | Kurt A. Jordan | Kathleen L. Hull | Laura L. Scheiber | Sarah Trabert | Paul N. Backhouse | Diane L. Teeman | Dave Scheidecker | Catherine Dickson | Hannah Russell | Ian Kretzler




Archaeologies of Hitler’s Arctic War


Book Description

This book discusses the archaeology and heritage of the German military presence in Finnish Lapland during the Second World War, framing this northern, overlooked WWII material legacy from the nearly forgotten Arctic front as ‘dark heritage’ – a concrete reminder of Finns siding with the Nazis, often seen as polluting ‘war junk’ that ruins the ‘pristine natural beauty’ of Lapland’s wilderness. The scholarship herein provides fresh perspectives to contemporary discussions on heritage perception and ownership, indigenous rights, community empowerment, relational ontologies and also the ongoing worldwide refugee crisis.




Archaeologies of Vision


Book Description

While many acknowledge that Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault have redefined our notions of time and history, few recognize the crucial role that 'the infinite relation' between seeing and saying plays in their work. Shapiro reveals the full extent of Nietzsche and Foucault's concern with the visual.




Incomplete Archaeologies


Book Description

Incomplete Archaeologies takes a familiar archaeological concept – assemblages – and reconsiders such groupings, collections and sets of things from the perspective of the work required to assemble them. The discussions presented here engage with the practices of collection, construction, performance and creation in the past (and present) which constitute the things and groups of things studied by archaeologists – and examine as well how these things and thing-groups are dismantled, rearranged, and even destroyed, only to be rebuilt and recreated. The ultimate aim is to reassert an awareness of the incompleteness of assemblage, and thus the importance of practices of assembling (whether they seem at first creative or destructive) for understanding social life in the past as well as the present. The individual chapters represent critical engagements with this aim by archaeologists presenting a broad scope of case studies from Eurasia and the Mediterranean. Case studies include discussions of mortuary practice from numerous angles, the sociopolitics of metallurgy, human-animal relationships, landscape and memory, the assembly of political subjectivity and the curation of sovereignty. These studies emphasize the incomplete and ongoing nature of social action in the past, and stress the critical significance of a deeper understanding of formation processes as well as contextual archaeologies to practices of archaeology, museology, art history, and other related disciplines. Contributors challenge archaeologists and others to think past the objects in the assemblage to the practices of assembling, enabling us to consider not only plural modes of interacting with and perceiving things, spaces, human bodies and temporalities in the past, but also to perhaps discover alternate modes of framing these interactions and relationships in our analyses. Ultimately then, Incomplete Archaeologies takes aim at the perceived totality not only of assemblages of artifacts on shelves and desks, but also that of some of archaeology’s seeming-seamless epistemological objects.




Media Archaeologies, Micro-Archives and Storytelling


Book Description

This book argues that today we live in the culture of the past that delimits our world and configures our potentialities. It explores how the past invades our presents and investigates the affective uses of the past in the increasingly elusive present. Remembering and forgetting are part of everyday life, popular culture, politics, ideologies and mythologies. In the time of the ubiquitous digital media, the ways individuals and collectivities re-presence their pasts and how they think about the present and the future have undergone significant changes. The book focuses on affective micro-archives of the memories of the socialist Yugoslavia and investigates their construction as part of the media archaeological practices. The author further argues that these affective practices present a way to reassemble the historical and relegitimize individual biographies which disintegrated along with the country in 1991.




Archaeology of Spiritualities


Book Description

Archaeology of Spiritualties provides a fresh exploration of the interface between archaeology and religion/spirituality. Archaeological approaches to the study of religion have typically and often unconsciously, drawn on western paradigms, especially Judaeo-Christian (mono) theistic frameworks and academic rationalisations. Archaeologists have rarely reflected on how these approaches have framed and constrained their choices of methodologies, research questions, hypotheses, definitions, interpretations and analyses and have neglected an important dimension of religion: the human experience of the numinous - the power, presence or experience of the supernatural. Within the religions of many of the world’s peoples, sacred experiences – particularly in relation to sacred landscapes and beings connected with those landscapes – are often given greater emphasis, while doctrine and beliefs are relatively less important. Archaeology of Spiritualities asks how such experiences might be discerned in the archaeological record; how do we recognize and investigate ‘other’ forms of religious or spiritual experience in the remains of the past?. The volume opens up a space to explore critically and reflexively the encounter between archaeology and diverse cultural expressions of spirituality. It showcases experiential and experimental methodologies in this area of the discipline, an unconventional approach within the archaeology of religion. Thus Archaeology of Spiritualities offers a unique, timely and innovative contribution, one that is also challenging and stimulating. It is a great resource to archaeologists, historians, religious scholars and others interested in cultural and religious heritage.




Archaeologies of Memory


Book Description

A unique collection of newly written essays by archaeologistsworking in a variety of contexts and geographical areas,Archaeologies of Memory is a groundbreaking text thatpresents a coherent framework for the study of memory in pastsocieties. Serves as an accessible introduction to central issues in thestudy of memory, including authority and identity, and the rolememory plays in their creation and transformation. Presents a collection of newly commissioned essays that providea coherent framework for the study of memory in pastsocieties. Brings together essays from both anthropological and classicalarchaeologists. Includes contributions drawn from a variety of cultures andtime periods, including New Kingdom Egypt and the prehistoricAmerican Southwest.




Elements of Architecture


Book Description

Elements of Architecture explores new ways of engaging architecture in archaeology. It conceives of architecture both as the physical evidence of past societies and as existing beyond the physical environment, considering how people in the past have not just dwelled in buildings but have existed within them. The book engages with the meeting point between these two perspectives. For although archaeologists must deal with the presence and absence of physicality as a discipline, which studies humans through things, to understand humans they must also address the performances, as well as temporal and affective impacts, of these material remains. The contributions in this volume investigate the way time, performance and movement, both physically and emotionally, are central aspects of understanding architectural assemblages. It is a book about the constellations of people, places and things that emerge and dissolve as affective, mobile, performative and temporal engagements. This volume juxtaposes archaeological research with perspectives from anthropology, architecture, cultural geography and philosophy in order to explore the kaleidoscopic intersections of elements coming together in architecture. Documenting the ephemeral, relational, and emotional meeting points with a category of material objects that have defined much research into what it means to be human, Elements of Architecture elucidates and expands upon a crucial body of evidence which allows us to explore the lives and interactions of past societies.




Historical Archaeology and Indigenous Collaboration


Book Description

Highlighting the strong relationship between New England's Nipmuc people and their land from the pre-contact period to the present day, this book helps demonstrate that the history of Native Americans did not end with the arrival of Europeans. This is the rich result of a twenty-year collaboration between Indigenous and nonindigenous authors, who use their own example to argue that Native peoples need to be integral to any research project focused on Indigenous history and culture.