By Bradley M. Sekedat, Brown University This edited volume is about a lot of things; so many things, in fact, that creating a summary of its component parts proves somewhat difficult for a brief review. Based on the introductory chapter, however, this difficulty seems intentional or, at the very least, acknowledged by the editors, who…
reviews and commentaries
A Response to The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece (2007) by Yannis Hamilakis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
by Elissa Z. Faro (Dartmouth College) January 20, 2009. On this historic day, when Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States of America, the issues that Hamilakis considers in this book – the relationship between the modern nation-state and its historical and material past – resonate anew. Hamilakis’ book…
The Earth After Us
Ever wondered what will survive, millions of years hence, of our railway networks, skyscrapers, motorways and rubbish dumps? What about trains and cars, or smaller artefacts like mobile phones and ballpoint pens? Such are the questions which the book poses. In this review of The Earth After Us by Jan Zalasiewicz I consider briefly some of the implications this book has for contemporary archaeology.
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,…
Review: “Heads of State: Icons, Power and Politics in the Ancient and Modern Andes”, by Denise Y. Arnold and Christine A. Hastorf. Left Coast Press, 2008.
Reviewed by Parker VanValkenburgh, Harvard University In 1991, social anthropologist Orin Starn accused Andeanist anthropologists of “missing the revolution” – essentially, of failing to consider that a movement like the Sendero Luminoso Maoist insurgency (The Shining Path) could emerge in a rural, primarily indigenous area of Peru. Starn was particularly critical of the work of…
Review of Stone Worlds: narrative and reflexivity in landscape archaeology
by Barbara Bender, Sue Hamilton and Christopher Tilley, 2007 Left Coast Press, 437 pages + notes, bibliography This is an innovative and creative book. These are its best qualities. The book is also ambitious, the authors setting themselves the task of both complying with the “archaeological morality” (269) of publishing the results of field investigations,…