Review of Richard J. Gould: Disaster Archaeology, The University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, 2007, ISBN 978-0-87480-894-0, 288 p., 55 figures, 5 tables, cloth. Richard Gould has a long pedigree as an archaeologist concerned with the present: he has made important contributions to ethnoarchaeology, modern material culture, historical archaeology and the archaeology of the…
Author: Alfredo González-Ruibal
The Borderland. Ethiopia.
Slavery/Fascism/Colonialism: Landscape in Gubba. In a hill over the border town of Gubba, very close to Sudan, stand the remains of a small palace. Its owner, Hamdan Abu Shok, was an infamous slave trader in the late 19th and early 20th century. The surviving brick arcades are redolent of Islamic architecture elsewhere. The ruins look…
An Archaeology of the Spanish Civil War
I was moved by a scene in Atom Egoyan’s film “Ararat” (2002). One of the main characters, a young Canadian of Armenian descent, goes back to Turkey to see the land that witnessed one of the most horrendous genocides of the twentieth century. He contemplates the landscape and films it in video. His gaze is…
Heideggerian Technemataology
The philosophy of Martin Heidegger has received much attention in archaeology since the 1990s (Gosden 1994; Thomas 1996; Dobres 2000; Karlsson 2000). Along with Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger has been the great influence in phenomenological archaeology. It is quite striking that it is the most intractable Heidegger, that of the first period (Being and Time, 1927), that…