Archaeology took on Science Studies (again) at the collective (4S) Society for Social Studies of Science and the History of Science Society and Philosophy of Science Association Conference this past weekend (November 2-4, 2006) in Vancouver, BC, Canada. The working title for the conference this year was: “Silence, Suffering and Survival.” While there has been…
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The most personal personal ornament
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Things can be mixed up during an excavation. Consequently, objects can be easily misplaced during our archaeological taxonomies. This was the case with the human-tooth pendant found at the excavation of the lakeside Neolithic settlement of Dispilio in Greece . During the study of the personal ornaments assemblage of the site…
Fresh scars on the body of archaeology
Note: a more detailed version of this entry with photographs is forthcoming in Past Bodies: An Archaeology of Bodily Practices, edited by Dusan Boric & John Robb, to be published by Berghahn Books. Forensic experts including a team of archaeologists examined bodies from the site of Batajnica near Belgrade, capital of Serbia & Montenegro. It…
Archaeologists as witnesses. Genealogies of destruction in the Amazon forest
There exists a widely-shared opinion among anthropologists today that globalization is first and foremost a creative process that allows new cultural forms to emerge through cultural contact, hybridization, diasporas, transnational networks, travel and so on (Inda and Rosaldo 2002). Many ethnographies emphasize the fact that the so-called traditional communities are negotiating, challenging, appropriating and contesting…
THE CLEARING: Heidegger and Excavation
text by Matt Edgeworth images by permission of Fotis Ifantidis In the midst of beings as a whole an open place occurs. There is a clearing, a lighting… Only this clearing grants and guarantees to us humans a passage to those beings that we ourselves are not, and access to the being that we ourselves…
“BEIJING 10/2003 AI WEIWEI”
A thing. While browsing the discount shelves at a bookstore in downtown, or rather ‘downcity’ (as the locals call it), Providence yesterday and I came across a peculiarly shaped book stamped: BEIJING 10/2003 AI WEIWEI Hard bound, covered in a grey paper, imprinted with a weave texture to give the appearance of cloth, the book…