A session at the US TAG 2013, Chicago Co-organizers: Alicia Jiménez (alicia.jimenez(at)stanford.edu) and Alfredo González-Ruibal (alfredo.gonzalez-ruibal(at)incipit.csic.es) Archaeology leans heavily on typologies and similarities. Narratives about cultural change, the spreading of ideas and diasporas are often linked to things that look alike but belong to different chronological or geographical frames. Material connections between “centers” and “peripheries”…
Author: Alfredo González-Ruibal
A review of Bjørnar Olsen: In Defense of things. Archaeology and the ontology of objects. Lanham: Altamira Press, 2010.
During the last decade, three books have appeared that mark a turning point in the way archaeology is both thought and practiced. These three books are Theatre/Archaeology (Pearson and Shanks 2001), The Dark Abyss of Time (Olivier 2008) and the one reviewed here. I think that we can talk now of a real loss of…
Returning to where we have never been
Spanish poet Julio Martínez Mesanza wrote: “I only want to return to the trenches, to the trenches where I have never been… I only want to return to the sadness of the Western front, which is my sadness” I share the feelings of Martínez Mesanza each time I work in a site from the Spanish…
Island of Abandonment
Mandji is as beautiful and perfect as a tourist poster. But it is also a rubbish dump of history. A few bungalows are being built in the expectation of tourism. But tourists do not come. And the bungalows decay, even before being finished, while their owners leave for France or Spain in search of better…
The Dark Abyss of Time.
A review of Laurent Olivier: Le sombre abîme du temps. Mémoire et archéologie. Seuil, Paris, 2008. French theory has had an enormous impact across the social and human sciences during the last forty years. We may hardly understand global trends in archaeology, history or anthropology without structuralism, post-structuralism or the Annales school. One may, thus,…
Archaeology and the failures of modernity: a session for WAC-6, Dublin, 2008
A session organized by Alfredo González-Ruibal (Complutense University of Madrid) and Ashish Chadha (Yale University). The relationship between archaeology and modernity is a growing concern for archaeologists. On the one hand, archaeologists ask how the discipline is involved in the construction of modern categories of thought, knowledge and society? Can modernist divides and prejudices be…