Numerous studies have focused on modernity’s destructive effect on traditional life- worlds, the desertion of villages and the ruination of rural areas. However, the fact that the modern condition also produces its own ruined materialities, its own marginalized pasts, is less spoken about. Since the 19th century, mass-production, consumerism and thus cycles of material replacement…
memory
The Leech Pond at Kerkenes Dağ
Ömür Harmanşah, Brown University “Animals, who exhibit life in highly concentrated and diverse forms, have the power to completely alter our way of thinking about ourselves and the forms we make, live in, and respond to…” (Ingraham 2006: 15) “In some way we recognize as true, nature and culture both share and compete for space,…
The Dark Abyss of Time.
A review of Laurent Olivier: Le sombre abîme du temps. Mémoire et archéologie. Seuil, Paris, 2008. French theory has had an enormous impact across the social and human sciences during the last forty years. We may hardly understand global trends in archaeology, history or anthropology without structuralism, post-structuralism or the Annales school. One may, thus,…
Load up the pantry? Or, load up the landfill?
Proviso: For most archaeolog readers this entry is an example of preaching to the converted. What follows is a response I pinned to a Wall Street Journal article back in April. It is for a different crowd, by which I mean a very general crowd. After being hoarded by the editorial staff of a couple…
Between Media Archaeology and Memory Practices: Two Recent Excavations
The recent opening of Paul Clancy’s “The Search for the Soul of a Building” in Providence, RI provided occasion for me to resurrect a languishing Archaeolog entry I had started back in the late spring and which has been annoyingly stapled to may desktop every since. Regarding the exhibition, Clancy’s subtext is what drew my…
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…