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…
entropy
Island of Abandonment
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…
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…
The Borderland. Ethiopia.
Slavery/Fascism/Colonialism: Landscape in Gubba. In a hill over the border town of Gubba, very close to Sudan, stand the remains of a small palace. Its owner, Hamdan Abu Shok, was an infamous slave trader in the late 19th and early 20th century. The surviving brick arcades are redolent of Islamic architecture elsewhere. The ruins look…