During the last decade, three books have appeared that mark a turning point in the way archaeology is both thought and practiced. These three books are Theatre/Archaeology (Pearson and Shanks 2001), The Dark Abyss of Time (Olivier 2008) and the one reviewed here. I think that we can talk now of a real loss of…
posts
The Complexity of Making within Disciplinary Traditions: Some Considerations of Ingold’s “The Textility of Making” in Archaeological Production Contexts
Elizabeth Murphy, Brown University In a recent article entitled “The Textility of Making,” Tim Ingold deconstructs what he describes as the hylomorphic model of creation (2010). This model views the material world according to conceptions of matter and form and tends to perceive material as static, finished products of preconceived human thought. In response to…
Giordano Bruno and St. Nick by the Fire
Santa Claus (courtesy of Coca-Cola ®) Since this is Christmas Eve, it might do well to try following a Christmas tradition. Or perhaps its intriguing antithesis in this brief speculation. Giordano Bruno said, “To think is to speculate with images.” Of course Bruno was burned at the stake for heresy in 1600 in Rome, and…
Part 1 of Moving on to Mobility: Archaeological Ambulations on the Mobile World
Ho-Yeol Ryu. Flughafen (2005). This is the first of four pieces on movement in archaeology. It part of an extended conversation that circulated around the authors’ co-chaired session on ‘movement’ at the TAG US conference held at Brown University, May 2010, (http://proteus.brown.edu/tag2010/8050). The idea for this Archaeolog piece, that is split into four parts, arose…
Northern conversations
The CHAT Conference at the University of Aberdeen, November 12th-14th, 2010 Union Square from the Citadel, Aberdeen. Photo taken by Lyn Mcleod and licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license. The Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory Conference (CHAT for short) takes a different guise wherever it goes. This year it was…
Time, Material Memory, and Public Sites: Part Two
Last week, I discussed time and how it relates to public sites, most especially churches. At churches, material memory takes the form of gravestones, architectural fabric, and the props of religious worship. To begin to think about these issues at St. Peter’s church let us consider the gravestones in the churchyard. Figure One: Sinking Stone…