Yannis Hamilakis An ancient architectural fragment from the Erechtheion on the Acropolis with an 1805 inscription in Ottoman Arabic (Photo by Fotis Ifantidis; cf. Paton 1927: 7-72; Hamilakis 2007: 98-99). During the course of a series of studies on the social and political lives of ruins in Greece (cf. Hamilakis 2007), I was, inevitably, often…
heritage
Caracol de la Resistencia: Zapatista Symbol References Maya Past
In an ethnographic interview conducted in June 2007, leaders of the autonomous community of Oventic in highland Chiapas, Mexico discussed with me and a colleague the meaning of the caracol (snail) as a Zapatista symbol. They explained that the ancient Maya ancestors used a conch shell as a horn to summon people to gather in…
On heritage and reconstruction
Last weekend I attended a workshop on heritage & reconstruction, organised by a group of young heritage professionals unhappy with the current state of both practice and theory in the German heritage sector. This was the sixth such workshop on “Reconsidering heritage management” (Nachdenken über Denkmalpflege). All the others have already been published at www.kunsttexte.de….
Open Source Archaeology and Heritage Ecologies? Taking ‘Yahoo!©s’ seriously at Teotihuacan, Mexico
A World Heritage site always attracts a lot of attention. Such archaeological sites are viewed to materially represent irreplaceable ‘heritage’ on a global scale and are defined and protected through the United Nations’ UNESCO declarations (eg. UNESCO 1988). Teotihuacan, Mexico is no exception. Replete with two monumental pyramids (the Pyramid of the Sun being the…