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…
contemporary archaeology
The Earth After Us
Ever wondered what will survive, millions of years hence, of our railway networks, skyscrapers, motorways and rubbish dumps? What about trains and cars, or smaller artefacts like mobile phones and ballpoint pens? Such are the questions which the book poses. In this review of The Earth After Us by Jan Zalasiewicz I consider briefly some of the implications this book has for contemporary archaeology.
“Trashed Out”: An archaeological reading of the foreclosure mess
Ian Straughn (Brown University) I. Foreclosure Alley and the trash stream Familiar are the images of the victims from hurricanes, earthquakes, fires and other natural and man-made disasters salvaging what they can from the ruins of their houses. Those items, whether sentimental mementos or the practical things of every day use, constitute the starting point,…
History on the Line, Davis Square
Christina J. Hodge, MA, PhD, RPA Senior Curatorial Assistant, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University Research Fellow, Department of Archaeology, Boston University The Oxford English Dictionary (2008) defines time as a “space” or “extent of existence” and “the interval between two successive events or acts.” Timelines exemplify this definition. Entrenched methods of representing…
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…
Has Anyone Seen Banksy?
A recent Archaeolog posting drew attention to the Graffiti Archaeology Project of Cassidy Curtis and his team, documenting accretional changes to graffiti walls in a number of urban locations in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. Such a project has become possible only by the development of software for the manipulation of digital imagery…