Mandji is as beautiful and perfect as a tourist poster. But it is also a rubbish dump of history. A few bungalows are being built in the expectation of tourism. But tourists do not come. And the bungalows decay, even before being finished, while their owners leave for France or Spain in search of better…
time
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,…
The Other Acropolis Project
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…
History on the Line, Davis Square
Christina J. Hodge, MA, PhD, RPA Senior Curatorial Assistant, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University Research Fellow, Department of Archaeology, Boston University The Oxford English Dictionary (2008) defines time as a “space” or “extent of existence” and “the interval between two successive events or acts.” Timelines exemplify this definition. Entrenched methods of representing…