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…
debate
I’ve seen Banksy. Have you?
By Ian Russell Photographs by Conor McCarthy Caption: Banksy’s portable toilet monument with the Glastonbury ‘sacred circle’ behind I would like to commend Prof. John F. Cherry for his recent contribution to Archaeolog titled ‘Has anyone seen Banksy?’. I am a firm supporter of the growing synergies between archaeology and contemporary art. As many archaeologists…
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…
“What comes after Post-processualism???”
I recently attended the Nordic-TAG conference in Århus in Denmark. It was a gathering of some 200 Scandinavian archaeologists and archaeology students interested in theory. After one paper I made a comment that I did not find very original at the time, but I received so many reactions even after returning home that I am…
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…