Mike Pearson died last week. He was a performance artist, theatre director, theorist and philosopher, scholar and teacher. And, as composer John Hardy said, Mike collaborated and connected – visual design, architectural stagecraft, poets, playwrights, composers, experimental jazz musicians, dancers, disability & gender specialists, comics, community art conveners, museum curators, traditional Japanese theatre performers, Patagonian farmers,…
memory
Studio update – Spring 2022
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…
Cardiff 1919 – theatre/archaeology
A team from National Theatre Wales, featuring Kyle Legall and Mike Pearson, have just published a powerful work of theatre/archaeology* in their series Storm, about the race riots in Cardiff Wales in 1919. It takes the form of a graphic novel with animated video and voice over. A timely intervention. https://www.cardiff1919.wales – [Link] *theatre/archaeology –…
Arthur’s O’on: A Lost ‘Wonder’ of Britain, Part 1
Darrell J. Rohl (d.j.rohl@durham.ac.uk) Department of Archaeology Durham University Near the end of the twelfth century Ralph de Diceto, dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, transcribed a tract entitled De Mirabilibus Britanniae, ‘On the Wonders of Britain,’ describing in variable detail 35 extraordinary natural and man-made features across England, Scotland and Wales (British Library…
An Archaeological Metaphysics of Care. On epistemography, heritage ecologies and the isotopy of the past(s)
A discussion yesterday with Bruno Latour, after his presentation “Manifesto for Compositionalism” at Oxford, hinged upon how we go about composing our collective world now that ‘nature’ is no longer an organizing category. The difficulty for analyses is that the modernist notion of nature supplied a related host of distinctions which we routinely call upon…
A Review of: Archaeologies of Placemaking: Monuments, memories and engagement in Native North America. Edited by Patricia Rubertone, One World Archaeology Series 59. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2009.
Archaeologies of Placemaking is the outcome of a WAC-5 session at Washington, D.C. in 2003. The following review of this volume is divided into two parts. The first part provides a summary of the nine chapters, and the second offers critical commentary on its content. Archaeologies of Placemaking contains an introduction and eight case studies…