Proviso: For most archaeolog readers this entry is an example of preaching to the converted. What follows is a response I pinned to a Wall Street Journal article back in April. It is for a different crowd, by which I mean a very general crowd. After being hoarded by the editorial staff of a couple…
Author: Christopher Witmore
Between Media Archaeology and Memory Practices: Two Recent Excavations
The recent opening of Paul Clancy’s “The Search for the Soul of a Building” in Providence, RI provided occasion for me to resurrect a languishing Archaeolog entry I had started back in the late spring and which has been annoyingly stapled to may desktop every since. Regarding the exhibition, Clancy’s subtext is what drew my…
A comment on “What comes after Post-processualism???”
On June 3 Cornelius Holtorf initiated an interesting discussion around the question “What comes after Post-processualism???” The discussion is extremely worthwhile and I wish add to a few comments in hopes of keeping it going. Processualism and post-processualism: the powers of the paradigm, manifold as they are, add to the persistence of these terms. What…
Id quod facimus sumus! (We are what we do!) A commentary on Ethnographies of Archaeological Practice: Cultural Encounters, Material Transformations
The disjuncture between ‘what we do’ and ‘what we say we do’ has contributed not only to a great deal of conversation and debate it has also lead to a fair amount of angst and misunderstanding in archaeology (i.e. theory/practice split or the homebase/field bifurcation). Many (myself included) firmly believe that this disjuncture can only…
“BEIJING 10/2003 AI WEIWEI”
A thing. While browsing the discount shelves at a bookstore in downtown, or rather ‘downcity’ (as the locals call it), Providence yesterday and I came across a peculiarly shaped book stamped: BEIJING 10/2003 AI WEIWEI Hard bound, covered in a grey paper, imprinted with a weave texture to give the appearance of cloth, the book…
Deprivation through ‘dialectics’: Why some archaeologist’s are hamstrung by things and why things are hamstrung by some archaeologists
Over the last few weeks I have been causally reading through the various chapters in a recent book edited by Elizabeth DeMarrais, Chris Gosden and Colin Renfrew entitled Rethinking materiality: The engagement of mind with the material world (2004). The book, the material product of a symposium with the same title held in March 2003…