(Image by Louis Psihoyos) Bill Rathje passed away on May 24th – just over a month shy of his 67th birthday. Everyone who knew Bill well loved him. And there was a lot to love about him. A kind and gentle man, Bill had a laugh that shook the room. This laugh was matched by…
Author: Christopher Witmore
Archaeology and the Speculative Turn
Here is the Prezi presentation for the paper I gave in Ben Alberti and Yvonne Marshall’s excellent “Worlds Otherwise” session during this weekend’s TAG at Brown University (click on the image above). I left this year’s Theoretical Archaeology Group with a profound sense of enthusiasm and excitement for the work being presented in that venue….
The realities of the past: archaeology, object-orientations, pragmatology
I have been fascinated by the implications of the speculative turn for archaeology for some time now (Graham Harman’s blog provides a conduit to the world of speculative realism; Harman currently has several books in press on the topic). I have been pulling together several pieces–aspects of which were presented in previous Theoretical Archaeology Group…
Innovation, future(s) making and archaeology
Components for wind turbines at port in Nafplion, Greece. Last Wednesday I attended a workshop at MIT entitled “Relocating innovation: Places and material practices of future making”. Convened by Lucy Suchman (in residence with the Department of Anthropology at MIT for the Spring of 2009), Endre Dányi and Laura Watts, all of the Centre for…
Symmetrical archaeology: Two clarifications
Things are in the limelight. Fresh in the wake of TAG US where the plenary session was focused on the Future of Things, two announcements came through the CHAT (Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory) listserv this past week for thing-oriented conferences/sessions. CHAT 2009 and What’s the ‘Matter’ in Anthropology, both set in Oxford, are…
‘Popular culture’ and the archaeological imagination: A commentary on Cornelius Holtorf’s Archaeology is a Brand! (2007)
When presented with the question of “why I became an archaeologist” I tend to cycle between 3 different responses; responses all rooted in childhood experiences. Indeed, which of these I dispense varies with whom I am speaking. My answers are: 1) I enjoyed both digging up and collecting bits and pieces of glass and metal…