Graham Harman diagrams the ‘fourfold’ object for STSers and archaeologists at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, Oxford Graham Harman recently visited Oxford for a week as part of a Mellon funded Sawyer Seminar. The organisers, archaeologist Chris Gosden and geographer Sarah Whatmore, both of the University of Oxford, put together an innovative format…
Author: Tim Webmoor
Narrowed Ego, Widened Identification: Un-fixing disciplinary relations. A review of “Archaeology and Anthropology: Understanding similarity, exploring difference”
edited by Duncan Garrow and Thomas Yarrow, 2010, Oxford: Oxbow Books (184 pp + index). For a while now archaeology has felt that ‘its time has come’. Growing with thoughtful practice, merging established methodologies with sophisticated and cosmopolitan theorizing, a disciplinary maturity urges making a mark in the academy. No need to repeat the by…
An Archaeological Metaphysics of Care. On epistemography, heritage ecologies and the isotopy of the past(s)
A discussion yesterday with Bruno Latour, after his presentation “Manifesto for Compositionalism” at Oxford, hinged upon how we go about composing our collective world now that ‘nature’ is no longer an organizing category. The difficulty for analyses is that the modernist notion of nature supplied a related host of distinctions which we routinely call upon…
‘Epistemography’ and Archaeological Assembling. A Manifesto for Media.
Archaeology, Science and Technology Studies, University of Oxford In 1922 the Mexican scholar Arreola published a study of maps and images which he had recovered from archives in Mexico City. Much of the material that he presented had not been studied before. Much of it was quite old, some of it dating to the initial…
Review of Stone Worlds: narrative and reflexivity in landscape archaeology
by Barbara Bender, Sue Hamilton and Christopher Tilley, 2007 Left Coast Press, 437 pages + notes, bibliography This is an innovative and creative book. These are its best qualities. The book is also ambitious, the authors setting themselves the task of both complying with the “archaeological morality” (269) of publishing the results of field investigations,…
The Future of Things at TAG 2009
In 1979, TAG was founded to explore interdisciplinary theoretical topics and its relevance to archaeological interpretations. Thirty years later, perhaps it is time to stop and critically evaluate where we are and where we want to go. Thus, to inaugurate a return to TAG’s roots, this plenary session provokes the big question: where are we…