This academic year I am on sabbatical leave finishing three long-running projects and planning to focus more on applications of the archaeological imagination to matters of common and pressing contemporary concern, especially through design foresight and futures literacy. This is why I have put to one side my critical commentary on all things archaeological and…
forensic archaeology
Bogolan to Baghdad: Textiles Tell the Story of Genocide in Iraq
Thomas M. Urban In summer of 2006 I left my job working for Brown University’s Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology to participate in a project in Iraq investigating mass graves for the Iraqi High Tribunal. My primary duty was analyzing “cultural objects” found in the graves of genocide victims. These objects included ballistic evidence, personal effects,…
Disaster Archaeology
Review of Richard J. Gould: Disaster Archaeology, The University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, 2007, ISBN 978-0-87480-894-0, 288 p., 55 figures, 5 tables, cloth. Richard Gould has a long pedigree as an archaeologist concerned with the present: he has made important contributions to ethnoarchaeology, modern material culture, historical archaeology and the archaeology of the…
Fresh scars on the body of archaeology
Note: a more detailed version of this entry with photographs is forthcoming in Past Bodies: An Archaeology of Bodily Practices, edited by Dusan Boric & John Robb, to be published by Berghahn Books. Forensic experts including a team of archaeologists examined bodies from the site of Batajnica near Belgrade, capital of Serbia & Montenegro. It…