The Archaeological Imagination
... The approach to the Whiteley industrial heritage as performance is focused on imagining the past, on narratives and representation while avoiding taming a past focused on magnifying a paternalistic and family entrepreneurial capitalism (Gillette 2022). In the following pages, I offer the historical context of the local fishing industry, some results of the archaeological mapping of the Whiteley fishery and house's current visible remains, and final insights into how the notions of imagination (Shanks 2020), post-preservation (DeSilvey 2017) and performance (Widrich 2014) can contribute to a collaborative project aiming to understand Bonne-Espérance's recent past. ...
... Paradoxically, this knowledge feeds a living past anchored in the absence of once-pivotal places. Digital archaeological approaches have been very informative in assessing the interest in heritage, history, and archaeology (Zuanni 2021), examining how the archaeological imagination and local memory narratives recursively supplement each other to understand those multiple 'sensibilities' (Shanks 2020) with the past's material record. In other words, they capture the 'affective attunement to the dynamic interplay of the presence of the past in remains, and the past's absence, simultaneously witnessed by such remains' (Shanks 2020, 47). ...
... As Barbara Voss has indicated, archaeology interested in historical and contemporary themes 'differed from other archaeologies not because of its engagement with documentary as well as material evidence, but rather because of the distinctiveness of the historical phenomena being investigated' (Voss 2010, 184). The distinctiveness of this research lies in examining a living past still very present in today's community memories, and indeed, imagination, this sensibility for the past that defines the archaeological project (Shanks 2020). Moreover, the recent past of Bonne-Espérance is materialized and situated in a context that challenges the archaeological paradigm of abandonment and, perhaps more importantly, the visible monumentality and tangibility of the industrial remains. ...
... Criticism is the primary tool archaeologists use to express disenchantment and change the future (HUTCHINGS; LA SALLE, 2019a;LEONE et al., 1987;PINSKY;WYLIE, 1989;ROLLER et al., 2014;SHANKS;TILLEY, 1987;SMITH, 2004;WILKIE;BARTOY, 2000;WURST 2014). It follows, then, that enchanted archaeology is a response to a particular kind of disenchantment and critique. ...
... As experts, archaeologists pride themselves on their ability to interpret the past, but they have yet to demonstrate that a truly scientific, objective archaeology is possible (SHANKS;TILLEY, 1987). What if, as sociologists tell us (BERGER; LUCKMANN, 1966), archaeology is a social construction? ...
... Most archaeologists believe in "rigorous science, and its inherent intellectual authority, and expect to have 'rights' over material culture often denied to others" (SMITH 1999, p. 30). Yet, while archaeology emphasises the material record, heritage is largely intangible and socially constructed in the present (SHANKS, 2012;SHANKS;TILLEY, 1987;SMITH, 2004;WATERTON 2009). This means that archaeological practice affects elements that are central to social identity and culture, but does not usually prioritise the wellbeing of those affected communities. ...
Os acadêmicos têm contemplado o desaparecimento da arqueologia por duas décadas. Neste artigo, examinamos algumas das críticas realizadas no decorrer desse período e a partir disso predizemos que os arqueólogos continuarão a promover a arqueologia — enquanto ignoram seus problemas centrais — até que os governos parem de dar poder aos arqueólogos e a arqueologia se torne social e economicamente insustentável. Embora não esteja em perigo iminente, os arqueólogos começaram a recontar o futuro da arqueologia, transformando-se em missionários encantados que estão curando o mundo.
... 16 A "alegoria moderna" (Russell, 2011) das "escavações" físicas e mnemónicas serve para os dois lados, e há mais a dizer sobre as respetivas práticas de investigação ou criação -com e "para além da metáfora" (Bailey, 2017;. Certamente que o cruzamento de imaginações, arqueológica (Shanks, 2012) e com arte (Gheorghiu, 2020), tem limites e debates no seio da arqueologia como ciência com os seus protocolos. Assim como na diversidade da arte contemporânea só uma pequena fração investe em projetos nesta linha (Gheorghiu & Barth, 2019). ...
... O segundo plano oferece a analogia para matérias e métodos de operar com as respetivas imaginações. A arqueologia, 18 uma área interessante pelas suas epistemologias, reflexividade, teorias críticas, novos pragmatismos e revelações constantes sobre primórdios, 19 define-se matricialmente como "disciplina das coisas" (Shanks, 2012;Shanks et al., 2012). Isto é, com "cuidado, obrigação e lealdade" para com essa mediação tangível do passado, não para o descobrir mas "trabalhar com o que fica" da experiência humana. ...
... Porque en definitiva el cómic documental de Prehistoria -y todavía más el cómic de ficción prehistórica-se mueven por la fascinación del pasado remoto y el afán por contar de otra manera las historias que esa fascinación provoca. Y es que los escritores de no-ficción -los arqueólogos-imaginan, recurriendo al concepto de imaginación arqueológica (Shanks 2012), mientras que los escritores de ficción inventan. Pero imaginar y inventar son hechos básicamente diferentes y persiguen diferentes objetivos (Pollock 2015: 284). ...
... Si los arqueólogos recuperamos fragmentos de las estructuras de habitación prehistóricas, la interpretación que hacemos constituye un acto de imaginación creativa, disciplinada y autocrítica, aunque esto último no siempre (Shanks 2012). Destacados y acotaciones en los márgenes del autor). ...
Se ofrece una panorámica general sobre los cómics de Prehistoria producidos y ambientados en la Península Ibérica. Primero se esbozan las relaciones históricas entre los cómics y la investigación prehistórica, se reafirma una propuesta clasificatoria de cinco subgéneros y después se rastrean los usos del pasado prehistórico en el moderno estado español de las Autonomías. A continuación se analiza una selección de cómics representativos de la Prehistoria remota, el Paleolítico, desde los primeros pobladores hasta la irrupción de la agricultura y la ganadería. Se introduce una reflexión sobre las interacciones entre la documentación arqueológica y la imaginación creativa y también se consideran algunos ejemplos de libros infantiles y de adultos. Finalmente se ofrecen unas reflexiones sobre el valor del cómic en la Prehistoria, la interacción mutua y las perspectivas de nuevas formas de comunicación a través de las viñetas. Nuevas posibilidades expresivas de viñetizar el pasado.
... Formålet med et slikt kart er å ikke ta monopol på meningene gjennom ikke å nekte gjestenes egne instinkter for å tolke under besøket. 17 Arkeologer bruker sine forestillingsevner (Shanks, 2012) og forholder seg til imaginaere objekt i etablering av kunnskap om «ting» (Sartre, 2004). Besøket åpner således opp for deltagelse i tolkningsprosessen. ...
... Arkeologen Shanks (2012) har undersøkt den arkeologiske forestillingsevnen («the archaeological imagination») og omtaler den som både kreativ og konstituerende («creative and constitutive»). I likhet med Shanks mener også jeg at en slik forestillingsevne kan settes i naer relasjon til narrativitet. ...
This thesis examines processes at play in the knowledge production in the interdisciplinary academic community, as well as the dissemination directed towards the general public, at the Museum of Archaeology at the University of Stavanger. It does so by examining what takes place during meetings at the museum’s outdoor knowledge arenas. My study is located at the intersection between archaeology, museology, and cultural studies/culture history. I highlight recent perspectives on audience, knowledge, and place by the use of analytical terms such as knowledge production, meeting place, involvement, memory, narration, visitors and site museum. The study has been conducted using qualitative methods such as participatory observations, interviews, and visual analyses. In the analysis, encounters between actors in connection with the university museum’s archaeological excavations are presented through my own confessional and impressionist tales, which are based on observations, conversations, and interviews with museum staff. I have conducted an ethnographic analysis of what occurs in knowledge production in a museal context. My study has uncovered a distinct museo-archeological form of knowledge production. The unique characteristic of the actors’ archaeological fieldwork is the frequency and diversity of interpretations connected to place, time, and experiences. The actors retain these interpretations from the field in the form of stories or memories from the work with archaeological structures, or through a selection of significant site elements. The museum experts have multidisciplinary meetings through walking tours of the sites. External actors contribute local knowledge to the project and provide a new understanding of specific places in the local community. The knowledge is transferred through active dissemination on the part of the archaeologists and creates the basis for collaboration and the development of new methods. Imaginary time travel occurs in encounters between archaeologists and the public. The public is directly or indirectly included in the museum’s knowledge production, as a part of the guided tour narrative, through activities or improvised forms of presentation. The archaeological excavations at the university museum are a part of the museum’s museal processes and are temporary places for scientific knowledge production. The sites are converted into meeting places for the production, transfer, and development of knowledge, in which the actors’ interaction is place- specific. External actors are members of the public who transfer, explore and take part in producing knowledge about the places being excavated by the university museum. Co-operation with the museum’s professional staff is a type of involvement that changes the local population or museum visitors into amateur archaeologists or fellow museo- archaeological researchers. In museal outdoor spaces, members of the public become discoverers, through becoming involved in an ongoing museo-archaeological knowledge production process. As such, imaginary time travel is not limited to activities in permanent museum institutions but is also tied to guided tour narratives and excavation activities, as parts of a temporary form of museum dissemination. The guests are presented with and involved in interpretations that are accessible in this museum without walls. The university museum’s excavation sites are converted into temporary site museums. This opens up for the public’s own experience and understanding of the past, at the same time as such encounters involve the public in knowledge co-production. Members of the public become co-creators or co-producers in a co-production museum. The university museum’s excavation sites enable another way of involving the public in a ‘museum without cabinets’ than that which can be offered through its permanent exhibitions. A museum space without cabinets is formed. The museum gains an outdoor knowledge arena that functions as a post- museum (Hooper-Greenhill, 2000), offering openness, co-operation, knowledge sharing and the actualisation of places and stories.
... 16 A "alegoria moderna" (Russell, 2011) das "escavações" físicas e mnemónicas serve para os dois lados, e há mais a dizer sobre as respetivas práticas de investigação ou criação -com e "para além da metáfora" (Bailey, 2017;. Certamente que o cruzamento de imaginações, arqueológica (Shanks, 2012) e com arte (Gheorghiu, 2020), tem limites e debates no seio da arqueologia como ciência com os seus protocolos. Assim como na diversidade da arte contemporânea só uma pequena fração investe em projetos nesta linha (Gheorghiu & Barth, 2019). ...
... O segundo plano oferece a analogia para matérias e métodos de operar com as respetivas imaginações. A arqueologia, 18 uma área interessante pelas suas epistemologias, reflexividade, teorias críticas, novos pragmatismos e revelações constantes sobre primórdios, 19 define-se matricialmente como "disciplina das coisas" (Shanks, 2012;Shanks et al., 2012). Isto é, com "cuidado, obrigação e lealdade" para com essa mediação tangível do passado, não para o descobrir mas "trabalhar com o que fica" da experiência humana. ...
This text (integrated in my academic aggegation) belongs to an essay on art, cultural heritage, remembrance and Europe. Here is the introduction and the first point: art (modern/contemporary) and cultural relations with the past. It is also a short an articulated reading of extensive bibliography. Other parts will have the overview of debates and agendas Europe for cultural heritage (EU&Council of Europe). They will have iconography.
The main in the overall essay is to advance a renewed framework to cross the problematic of cultural heritage with that of remembrance. Not to be confused limitedly with mere memory (furthermore always complex with inductions and re/constructions). Neither as just a cultural memory. A umbrella notion that I discuss in some part because it obscures the web of plural pasts (and the kind of pasts) enrolled in (again) plural memories & heritages.
Remembrance implies the relationship between memory and history with returns, rescues and more dimensions of memories. History is embedded in cultural heritages themselves transporting various pasts in chronological terms, among other connotations.
The two areas of heritage and remembrance are vast but rather redundant, so arguments and evidence are summarized.
The binomial is joined by the triangulation distinguishing mnemonic, heritage, and historicity regimes that relate the present with various categories of past. It is the core of the perspective, which refers not to areas but to transversal experiences of time, or times, in the "vocabulary of the present".
The gaze is therefore directed towards intersections and semantics of times (historical, distant, recent, contemporary, etc.) in/with heritage; remembrance; and art as another mode of bridge/break of time
... Mit anderen Worten: Vergangenheiten existieren nur im konkreten Erzählprozess. Archäologie (Hodder et al., 1995;Shanks, 2012) wie Geschichtsschreibung (Lowenthal, 1985;Goertz, 2001) haben zusammen mit der Ethnologie (Cli ord & Marcus, 1986;Geertz, 1988) ihre narratologische -deshalb aber keineswegs ktionale, wohl aber konstruktivistische -Seite entdeckt. Eine strikt genetische Psychoanalyse (Mertens & Haubl, 1996, S. 29-33), die solche Narrative als zu dekonstruierende, verfälschende Überformungen einer »eigentlichen«, historischen Wahrheit betrachtet, kommt hier an ihr Ende. ...
... This haunting can be considered as part of the 'environmental uncanny', caused by the experience of rapid climate breakdown in the Anthropocene (Ghosh 2014, 32), an uncanniness that offers a further intersection with archaeology. It is rooted in a sensibility described by Michael Shanks as 'the archaeological imagination' (Shanks 2012) and which involves the persistence of the past in the present, the dynamics between presence and absence, and a focus on the quotidian or everyday (Shanks and Svabo 2013, 91). It is in such quotidian or everyday objects, argues David Farrier (2016), that we sense the uncanniness of our current epoch, and so archaeology, as the discipline of things -particularly resilient things or the 'stuff that remains' -has a particular affinity with the Anthropocene (Pétursdóttir 2017, 178). ...
... La arqueología histórica, y otras arqueologías con acceso a la evidencia textual y la tradición oral, son especialmente adecuadas para tal empresa (Wilkie, 2009:338;Beaudry, 2017;Beaudry y Konrad A. Antczak Symonds, 2010, XIII-XIV). Por último, hay que subrayar que reensamblar los conjuntos de práctica es, más que un ejercicio neopositivista o con ínfulas de objetividad, siempre es un ejercicio creativo (Marila, 2017) para "contar una historia" (Joyce, 2006:61-64) utilizando la "imaginación arqueológica" (Shanks, 2012) para así crear interpretaciones y presentaciones del pasado convincentes, reveladoras y memorables no solo para los académicos, sino también para múltiples públicos (van der Linde et al., 2018). ...
En este capítulo abro una ventana a las desconocidas vidas de los marineros que durante los siglos XVII y XVIII navegaron el Caribe venezolano en búsqueda de sal marina, dejando grandes cantidades de cosas cotidianas en sus campamentos a orillas de la salina de la Isla de La Tortuga. Aquí explico el marco teórico y metodológico de “conjuntos de práctica” que desarrollé para organizar y entender mejor esta gran abundancia de cosas y sus entrelazamientos con los marineros a través del tiempo. Empleando el marco de “conjuntos de práctica” y manteniendo un diálogo constante entre la evidencia arqueológica y los archivos, revelo algunos de los cambios en estos conjuntos que acontecieron entre el siglo XVII y XVIII. Finalmente, a través de este capítulo busco desempolvar el pasado colonial olvidado del Caribe venezolano y volver a engarzarlo con el panorama oceánico más amplio del Gran Caribe y el mundo atlántico. Como concluyo, el Caribe venezolano era mucho más que un sereno remanso o una barrera húmeda, era un vital y pujante tejido conectivo que unía a gentes y cosas de mares cercanos y lejanos en nuevos y crecientes entrelazamientos. - In this chapter I open a window onto the unknown lives of sailors who during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries sailed the Venezuelan Caribbean in search of sea salt, leaving large quantities of everyday things in their campsites by the saltpan of the Island of La Tortuga. Here I explain the theoretical and methodological framework of "assemblages of practice" that I developed to organize and better understand this great abundance of things and their entanglements with seafarers over time. Employing the framework of "assemblages of practice" and maintaining a constant dialogue between archaeological and archival evidence, I reveal some of the changes in these assemblages that occurred between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Finally, through this chapter I seek to unearth the forgotten colonial past of the Venezuelan Caribbean and reconnect it with the broader maritime panorama of the Greater Caribbean and the Atlantic world. As I conclude, the Venezuelan Caribbean was much more than a sleepy backwater or a wet barrier, it was a vital and thriving connective tissue that linked people and things from near and distant shores in new and growing entanglements.
... Por essa via, podemos entender melhor as possíveis conexões entre práticas arqueológicas e uma diversidade de assombrações, conforme expresso em estudos bastante heterogêneos. As aproximações com o tema têm sido realizadas no intuito de estimular a imaginação arqueológica (Shanks, 2012), considerar os encantamentos e poderes produzidos por coisas arqueológicas (Fredengren, 2016), refletir sobre experiências atreladas ao lugar e à paisagem (Paphits, 2020), analisar histórias de opressão colonial em busca de uma cura terapêutica por meio do conhecimento (Surface-Evans; Jones, 2020), discutir questões relacionadas à patrimonialização, tangibilidade e intangibilidade (Carr, 2020), problematizar processos históricos traumáticos vinculados com o autoritarismo de regimes políticos do passado recente e presente (González-Ruibal, 2008;Ribeiro, 2019), conceber fantasmas como sítios de memória (Tamás, 2013), abordar regimes de conhecimento e temporalidades (Escolar, 2003;Haber, 2011), participar das lutas de coletivos pelo direito de interpretar e construir sentidos específicos de patrimônio arqueológico (Bezerra, 2017(Bezerra, , 2019Gómez-Montañez, 2013;Macêdo, 2021;Ribeiro, 2014;Silveira;Bezerra, 2012), entre outros empreendimentos. ...
Em nossos trânsitos pelo Sudeste e Sudoeste do Piauí, temos percebido que seguir as práticas arqueológicas pode produzir engajamentos com seres e eventos assombrados, que projetam para a dimensão da experiência, a existência de múltiplas realidades. Tais cruzamentos são expressos em narrativas que se relacionam em parte com o termo “livusia”. Argumentamos que, nessas interfaces, vêm sendo elaboradas algumas estratégias de construção de mundos e de associações entre seres e coisas, que desafiam os discursos autorizados sobre o patrimônio. Na conjuntura, discorreremos como as arqueologias abertas para diferentes formas de conhecimento estão bem posicionadas para refletir sobre interações que são sedimentadas nos territórios da sensorialidade e dos afetos, permitindo visualizar esboços do pluriverso, no contexto de uma ontologia política.
... Megalithic monuments -which are but the result of metamorphic processes (Shanks, 2012: 148) -do not experience an afterlife, as Bradley (1993) pointed out, but live in a continuum, in a "[…] continuous state of becoming (or vanishing)" (Holtorf, 2008: 412). Rather than seeing megalithism as an essence, we strive towards a view that replaces it with "[…] an altering history of contingency […]" (Ashok, 2007: 1, apud Holtorf, 2008, where instead of a hermeneutic of recovery that focuses on the origin and the reconstruction of the first meaning of the monument we have a hermeneutic of reception (Holtorf, 1994(Holtorf, , 2008. ...
Resumo:Neste artigo, pretendemos pensar o Megalitismo para além da sua cronologia (pré-histórica). Para isso, torna-se necessário ultrapassar a reutilização como conceito. Eclipsá-lo implica vê-lo como um testemunho do pensamento moderno, com todos os problemas que daí advêm. Seguindo as ideias de Augustin Berque, filósofo e geografo francês, ultrapassar-se-á o conceito de reutilização e propor-se-á um novo sistema de classificação baseado em reapropriações e resignificações, usando o megalitismo do Centro/Sul de Portugal como exemplo. Com este objectivo, iremos sustentar empiricamente a validade de estudos megalíticos para lá da pré-história através da análise de sete tropos transcronológicos, fornecendo bases teóricas e práticas para estudos futuros: 1) Megalitismo como recurso/alteridade prática; 2) Megalitismo como marco territorial, 3) Megalitismo como parte da natureza, 4) Megalitismo como (espaço do) Outro, 5) Megalitismo como passado mitologizado, 6) Megalitismo contemporâneo como identidade estética, 7) O Megalitismo como monumento pré-histórico.Palavras-chave: Megalitismo; Transcronológico; Augustin Berque; Hermenêuticas da Recepção; Reutilização; Modernidade Abstract: In this paper, we wish to think Megalithism beyond its (prehistorical) chronology. For that, it becomes necessary to overpass reuse as a concept. Eclipsing it requires seeing it as a testimony of modern thought, with all the problems that come with it. Following the ideas of Augustin Berque, we will overpass the concept of reuse and propose a new classification system based on reappropriations and resignifications, using the megalithism of the Centre/South of Portugal as an example. With this in mind, we will empirically sustain the validity of megalithic studies beyond prehistory through the analysis of seven common trans-chronological tropes, giving theoretical and practical backgrounds for future studies: 1) Megalithism as a Resource/Practical Alterity; 2) Megalithism as a territorial marker, 3) Megalithism as part of Nature, 4) Megalithism as the (space of the) Other, 5) Megalithism as Mythologised Past, 6) Contemporary Megalithism as Aesthetical Identity, 7) Megalithism as a prehistoric monument.Keywords: Megalithism; Trans-chronological; Augustin Berque; Hermeneutics of Reception; Reuse; Modernity
... The archaeological emphasis placed on the materiality of things is crucial here. Archaeologists do not dig up the past (history) as it really was, but rather work on what remains of that past here and now (Shanks 2012). These material relics are but a pale shadow of the past. ...
Artykuł omawia archeologiczną wartość dziedzictwa niedawnej przeszłości, biorąc za studium przypadku pewien złoty pierścionek. Artefakt stanowi kontekst do analizy dwóch zagadnień dotyczących archeologicznych badań nad niedawną przeszłością. Pierwsza kwestia dotyczy postrzegania współczesnej archeologii jako praktyki pamięci niż historii minionych społeczności. Drugi problem stanowi omówienie tzw. archeologii rodziny (family archaeology) jako perspektywy badawczej, gdzie archeolodzy badają własną przeszłość i korzenie rodzinne. Celem pracy jest prezentacja archeologii jako wartościowej metody odkrywania, analizowania i przywracania społecznych i materialnych wspomnień z bliskiej przeszłości.
... However, in parallel to external influence, archaeology also is shaped by archaeology itself. The archetypal forms of archaeological work (Moser, 2007) and social and practical organisation archaeological practices shape and enable archaeological knowledge production (Shanks, 2012) together with paradigmatic theories (Kristiansen, 2014b) and the structures of organising and exhibiting archaeological knowledge (Coye, 2009) and information (Huvila, 2019c) in different forms and modalities. Even if archaeology has never been a solitary undertaking, discourse and knowledge production has been traditionally a concern of individual archaeologists who have directed fieldwork and research projects (Huvila, 2017a). ...
Archaeology is a profoundly social and collaborative enterprise. Even if it is a discipline of things, archaeology is also a discipline of discourses of things. The making of new archaeological information and knowledge both leans on and weaves a conversation of the past that is fundamentally as social as it is material. These conversations traverse an immense spectrum of archaeological practices and contexts far beyond archaeology itself. This chapter provides an overview of how discourses are produced in archaeology, their characteristics and contemporary facets, and how studying the social production of archaeological discourse(s) is helpful for understanding archaeology and archaeological knowledge. Discourse refers not only to talking or writing about archaeology but documenting, communicating and conveying archaeology, archaeological information and knowledge in diverse means, and by doing that, influencing archaeological practices and the production of archaeological knowledge. The chapter starts by asking where contemporary archaeological discourse is produced and continue to inquiring into who participates and who are left out, how to analyse and explain archaeological discourses, what characterises them, and finally, why understanding the social production of archaeological discourse can be useful for archaeologists and non-archaeologists.
... Such a melding of the past and present exemplifies what archeological theorist Michael Shanks has termed the "archaeological imagination"-how the archaeological becomes embedded within widespread ways of thinking about the past and how we relate to the past as it exists in the present, whether this is the material remains of the past or through memory and cultural history. 58 Shanks' theory centers on the notion of kairos, an ancient Greek conception of time in which the past and present meet in an opportune moment, the "kairotic moment," which "is neither purely of the past nor the present, nor the re-presented past; it is the past-as-it-interrupts-the-present." 59 It is this moment of encounter, of experience, and of interaction with the past that unites the desires of archaeologists, driven by the moment of discovery, and of tourists who wish to directly explore the archaeological as represented in the kairos. ...
For British Anglican tourists, archaeological tourism in Palestine marked an expansion of a broader British cultural and religious relationship to Palestine as a land made familiar by a childhood of bible stories and nativity scenes, and one which played a role in the biblification of Palestine and the appropriation of its past to validate and strengthen a connection to Britain and the Mandate. Archaeology offered a direct link to the materiality of the biblical past, experienced via a “kairotic moment” in which the past meets the present. By examining reports of British travelers to Palestine, this article considers how materially embodied religious experiences not only drove tourist movement to Palestine but also functioned as a keystone in Britain’s relationship with Palestine during the Mandate period. Behind this growth in archeological tourism, however, is a story of tension, most notably between Mandate Palestine’s first director of antiquities, John Garstang, and the Mandate and Westminster governments. From his optimism in a report on the future of archaeology in Palestine in 1919 to his bitter resignation in 1926, Garstang’s story represents the Mandate’s failures with regard to archaeology. These tensions and Garstang’s unease foreshadowed the development of archaeology as a tool of settler colonialism in occupied Palestine today.
... A vibrant community of scholars have investigated the diverse connections between art and archaeology (Renfrew 1999(Renfrew , 2003(Renfrew , 2004Jameson 2003;Vilches 2007Vilches , 2011Harrison and Schofield 2010;Harrison 2011Harrison , 2013Jones and Bonaventura 2011;Shanks 2012;Russell and Cochrane 2014;Chittock and Valdez-Tullett 2016;Sjöstrand 2017;Bailey 2017aBailey , 2017bBailey , 2018. Andrew Jones and Paul Bonaventura (2011: 6) indicate that both art and archaeology are "interested in the synoptic vision of the past and how it can function today." ...
This chapter reflects on the future of archaeological museum as an institution that is actively engaged in public debates on current social, cultural and economic problems, and serves as an instrument for democratic education. An idea of a “critical archaeological museum” is introduced and discussed in reference to a claim that only by (re)connecting museums and academies, museums can actively engage in on-going social discussions and debates. The discussion is supported by an analysis of a contemporary Polish artwork performed by Agnieszka Kalinowska, “Heavy water”.
... Ao passo que o termo cultura material parece ser cada vez mais utilizado como algo indissociável do material e imaterial se afastando dessa forma de definição ou descrição do material em benefício do termo "materialidade" (Tilley, 2004;Miller, 2005;Meskell, 2005 (Shanks, 2016;Kasperski & Storm, 2020;Harrison, 2020;Holtorf & Högberg, 2020;. A seguir, os patrimônios tangíveis e intangíveis relacionados ao mundo vegetal serão abordados para aprofundar entendimento sobre emaranhamentos humanos e não-humanos no contexto da presente pesquisa. ...
Essa tese tem como objetivo discutir sobre a obtenção de 70.000 sementes de borracha
por Henry Wickham, no Baixo Amazonas. Em 1876, Wickham vendeu essas sementes
coletadas em Santarém (Pará) para o Kew Gardens e, a partir das sementes germinadas,
a borracha (Hevea brasiliensis) foi introduzida no Ceilão, colapsando a economia
gomífera no Brasil. Produtos de borracha, como luvas, botas para neve, pneus e itens
industriais, na virada do século XX, moldariam o mundo ao que se poderia chamar de
"moderno". Nesse sentido, pode-se dizer que a assepsia e a globalização eclodiram sob a
produção de materiais de borracha. No entanto, o local onde as sementes de seringueira
nativa foram colhidas foi deixado para trás. Atualmente, a maioria dessas comunidades
de seringueiros no Baixo Amazonas ainda não possui energia elétrica e sobrevivem
principalmente através de práticas tradicionais (caça, pesca, produção de farinha de
mandioca e venda de produtos florestais em menor escala). Através de materiais
arqueológicos encontrados na vila de Boim (Santarém, Pará), dados históricos e a cultura
material envolvida na materialidade do período da borracha aqui será discutido como a
borracha se tornou uma das caixas pretas da modernidade - em perspectiva latouriana - e
como hoje as pessoas lidam com esse patrimônio e seu futuro.
... Materiality, memory, decay, death, fragmentation, emotions, human craft, ambivalence and meaning: archaeology at its purest is about all these things (Shanks 2012). And all of these things are remembered and manifested in and though material culture from the Czersk camp. ...
In 2014, the first remains of a former prisoner-of-war (PoW) camp in Czersk, Poland, were discovered. These were largely relics of barracks, dug-outs and trash pits. They were recorded thanks to Open Access Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) derivatives in the form of hillshade models. Since that time, this unique heritage has become the object of closer, non-invasive archaeological
research. This chapter discusses and summarizes various archaeological and social initiatives regarding the Czersk camp that have been taking place since the discovery.
... Scholars have used this concept to explore interceptions between art and archaeology (Jameson, Christine, and Ehrenhard 2003;Van Dyke and Bernbeck 2015) as well as a theoretical tool to engage with a broad range of social and cultural issues (e.g. Wallace 2004;Sanders 2009;Shanks 2012). While a concern for the risks of an 'imaginative' archaeology have led many to discourage any creative interference with the 'scientific' core of the discipline (e.g. ...
Life in the Roman World (LitRW) is a programme for schools based on research carried out by the School of Archaeology and Ancient History (SAAH) at the University of Leicester (UoL) on Roman-era identities, and large-scale investigation of Roman Leicester by University of Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS). LitRW includes a book and teaching resources which have introduced new non-traditional audiences to the complex, diverse communities of the Roman world through the prism of local heritage. This programme has dramatically increased teacher and pupil engagement with archaeology and classical subjects in state schools in the East Midlands, making Roman-era history, culture and language accessible to c. 9,900 participants, many from disadvantaged backgrounds.
... L'idée d'imagination selon Appadurai alimentera notre discussion sur le rôle de l'archéologie dans les formes de représentation du passé, car l'imagination n'est plus institutionnalisée, mais plutôt fragmentée tout en étant fort de plusieurs possibilités. Les effets de cette imagination deviennent imprévisibles et le processus d'interprétation archéologique est donc plus complexe (Shanks, 2012). Si la mondialisation, suivant Appadurai, n'est pas un avatar d'impérialisme culturel, alors sous quelles formes institutionnelles la modernité et ses représentations du passé s'expriment-elles ? ...
Au Chili, le processus de modernisation qui, au début du XXe siècle, s'est traduit par l'expansion du capitalisme et de l'industrialisation a eu des répercussions économiques et sociales profondes. La culture matérielle associée aux industries minières modernes et leur influence sur les sociétés autochtones ont cependant fait l’objet de très peu d’études archéologiques. Cette thèse s’intéresse à l’exploitation du soufre dans la communauté autochtone quechua d’Ollagüe, située dans la région d’Antofagasta, au Nord du Chili. À partir de la fin du XIXe siècle, après la guerre chilienne contre le Pérou et la Bolivie (1879-1883), la région entama un long processus d'expansion capitaliste lié à diverses activités minières extractives. Les camps miniers, en tant que nouveaux centres de travail, ont fait appel à de nombreux produits, services et travailleurs, entraînant un vaste processus de migration et une augmentation de la population. Dispersées dans le paysage andin d'Ollagüe, à 4000 mètres d'altitude, les ruines de l'extraction minière du soufre témoignent des impacts de l'industrialisation et de l'expansion capitaliste dans la région. L’étude des transformations socioculturelles générées par l'exploitation minière industrielle dans la communauté locale est fondée, dans cette thèse, sur la documentation de trois camps miniers de soufre abandonnés – Buenaventura, Station Puquios et Santa Cecilia. J'explore leur histoire à travers l'étude de l'espace social et de la culture matérielle pour examiner l'identité des travailleurs miniers et de leurs familles, ainsi que leurs conditions de vie et de travail sur les hauteurs des volcans. Soulignant les spécificités de la modernisation et de l'expansion capitaliste du Chili, cette thèse aborde la culture matérielle industrielle en termes de continuités, de fragmentation et de ruptures. Elle vise à rendre visible et à valoriser la culture matérielle moderne associée aux industries minières du XXe siècle. Je soutiens que le processus de modernisation, les ruines industrielles et la culture matérielle du passé récent ont généré des espaces de mémoire qui sont aujourd’hui entrelacés avec les préoccupations contemporaines de la communauté autochtone locale.
... In front of the force of Nature that transforms matter as if trying to continue the human creation, during psychogeographic pilgrimages I am sometimes carried away by imagination interpreting the details captured in photographs as discreet or obvious signs on the walls of ruins that invite me to listen to the stories of their past. The artistic imagination is to be found in the scientific one, such as the archaeological imagination (Shanks, 2012;Gheorghiu, 2020), and psychogeography is located on the border between these two perspectives of knowledge. Psychogeographic experiences have allowed me to express in a creative manner, the way in which the ruins proudly tell their fascinating stories. ...
This paper describes an experiential archaeology project carried out in three cities in Portugal, Mação, Tomar and Lisbon and analyses, from a poetic perspective, the effects of Time on matter using psychogeography as a method of exploring the urban landscape.In this case psychogeography was used to experience a poem by the great Portuguese modernist writer and poet Fernando Pessoa, in the same way an observer experiences a cityscape. Photographs of ruins that show traces of degradation caused by the passage of time are presented in the form of four condensed visual narratives that visualise four different versions of the poem's verses.
... Para a análise contextual aplicada à arqueologia regional, o registro arqueológico do Médio Solimões pode dar sustentação para as avaliações feitas pelos cronistas. As fontes escritas, por sua vez, alargam contextualmente suas possibilidades interpretativas e potencializam a imaginação arqueológica (Shanks 2016) para sua compreensão. O cruzamento entre fontes dá maior peso a algumas impressões dos cronistas, enquanto também sinalizam para a necessidade de pensar esse local como parte de grandes redes de troca presentes antes, durante e depois do contato. ...
O rio Solimões foi um dos principais caminhos por onde passaram os primeiros viajantes europeus que conheceram a Amazônia. Nos séculos XVI e XVII, expedições atravessaram esse rio junto a cronistas que, além das paisagens, descreveram as diversas e distintas populações indígenas que habitavam suas margens. O presente trabalho preliminar discute essas fontes históricas referentes ao médio curso do rio Solimões pela perspectiva pouco aprofundada da arqueologia. Para realizar a discussão serão apresentadas as principais fontes da época, seus contextos de produção e as problemáticas envolvidas em sua análise. Depois, serão abordadas as descrições realizadas sobre os grupos indígenas do Médio Solimões no século XVI e XVII. Então, serão elencadas análises possíveis das crônicas no levantamento de informações contextuais arqueológicas, sobre padrões de assentamento, práticas e produtos, e redes de trocas. Por fim, serão traçadas as potencialidades de uma arqueologia documental no tratamento dessas fontes para a pesquisa arqueológica e para a pesquisa histórica.
This article examines the issue of terminological fragmentation in the archaeology of the Carpathian Basin, arising from semantic and semiotic factors shaped by cultural and national perspectives. Examples of divergent terminology for the same archaeological cultures, such as the Trypillia–Cucuteni and Körös–Criș–Starčevo, are analyzed. It is established that terminological divergence poses significant challenges for cross-cultural academic communication and the epistemological unity of the discipline. Possible approaches to addressing these challenges are proposed, including collaborative terminology development, enhancing cross-cultural education, and utilizing technological solutions to accommodate diverse terminologies.
This creative practice thesis-by-publication employs and explores the concept of ‘deep mapping’ as a creative method and research methodology. Deep mapping offers a means of contributing to a body of knowledge by responding in a considered, postcolonial or count- er-hegemonic way to place.
The thesis contributes to the development of deep mapping as a conceptual approach in the creative and media arts and also aims to integrate placemaking and critical theory. It contributes to an understanding of how art practice has an important role to play in socio-ecological change through affective communication. One point of focus in the whole is a local urban river system in Sydney, Australia.. In this research I trace the river’s specific entanglements within a post- or interdisciplinary framework and employ poetic discursive mechanisms in my ‘deep map’ of the river. The creative outputs take the form of multimedia public and community art installations, and the texts draw on a range of textual forms from fictocriticism to historiographical writings and subjects, critical cultural theory, discussions of political ecology and environmental-based arts activism.
The project seeks to be cognizant of diverse disciplinary communities and to interact and engage with broader publics. The deep mapping that is developed here, while crossing disci- plinary lenses and art practices, brings the lived experience of a local urban river into focus in a transforming way. What emerges through deep mapping and a research practice informed by a multidisciplinary approach is how the published works –creative, fictocritical and the- oretical– become techniques of ‘soft persuasion’. As such, this composite arrangement of
connected pieces and writings draws on the ‘cosmopolitical’ proposal as enunciated by Isabelle Stengers while drawing on the postcolonial and the democratic impulses explored and animated by Bruno Latour and others. This approach to the terrain opens new spaces for engagement and comes with new explanatory ‘legends’ highly relevant to us today. This contributes to the urgent need before us in addressing outstanding social justice concerns and equally unresolved matters of ecological importance. The constructed deep map may therefore, in turn, be consid- ered a method of prompting a consideration of the complexities of our entangled living within a more-than-human world.
Cultural heritage in the Middle East has over the past decades been treated and discussed in terms of an unfolding catastrophe. International archaeologists have responded with a set of emergency measures that include the remote monitoring of site conditions, the exposing of the trade in illicit antiquities, and the provision of technical assistance and training for the conservation, reconstruction, and monitoring of monuments and sites. These international initiatives, by and large, have steered clear of a discourse with local practitioners and communities about archaeology as a way of creating knowledge about the past, its historical and intellectual roots, and its complex intersections with old and new political ideologies and identities. In this article, we argue that an open discourse about archaeology as more than a set of technical skills to be mastered provides a fruitful and largely unexplored avenue toward building a more place-based and community-centered approach to cultural heritage and its stewardship in the region. We illustrate this with the work and results of our collaborative cultural heritage project in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.
The idea that imagination is everywhere in our lives, and that reality is an illusion, may sound absurd to the concrete mind. This book will try to convince you that imagination manifests in different 'phases,' encompassing even the most fundamental ideas about what is real (ontology) and what is true (epistemology). It is present in the contents (e.g., images) and the acts (e.g., fantasy) of our minds. Imagination helps us remove barriers through conscious planning and finds ways to fulfill unconscious desires. The many words related to imagination in the English language are part of a unified web and share a “family resemblance.” The first section of this book deals with imagination in everyday life, the second focuses on aesthetic imagination, and the third discusses scholarly approaches that incorporate both imagination types. The fourth section proposes a unified model integrating the diverse ways that imagination is manifested in our culture.
Constellation of fragments, be it words, images, and artefacts, to Walter Benjamin, is an inexhaustible structure of meaning production; it is a method of constant dispersion and reconstruction—method of detour—that renders allegory wherein uninterrupted meanings of things are absent. The assertion provides a theoretical reference to inquire into the relations between archives and historical meanings in the practices of Hong Kong contemporary art. The engagement of archival materials—historical documentations and material traces of the past—in and the development of archives on contemporary art are inevitably entangled with histories and their writing.
Subsurface investigation has long been a core activity in archaeology. Though undeniably important, this has had the effect of vectoring observation insistently downwards and emphasizing time in terms of stratigraphic position. Above-ground marks inscribed by specific momentary events in time can also disclose rich archaeological information but require different ways of seeing. I consider three brief examples of this. The first is that of Hiroshima in 1945 and how watches worn at the moment the atomic bomb was detonated represent visual testimony. I then turn to the case of Pompeii and how the casts of victims of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD represent an attempt to solidify time. The final example centers on damage inflicted on the Athenian Parthenon in centuries past and the connection with present-day programs of restoration.
When it comes to cinema, posthumanism has tended to focus explicitly on technology, machines, cyborgs, hybrids, and monsters. An alternative approach is sought in this article. First, the relationship between posthumanism and what is here called the “decolonial imagination” is elaborated upon. The two are then further related to a recent curatorial intervention in India called “Cinema of Prayōga,” which seeks to situate certain Indian filmmakers (and films) within a heterogeneous premodern tradition of philosophy and the arts. Also included is a brief discussion of colonial responses to Indian iconography, as well as evidence for a posthumanist strain in both Indian art and philosophy. The intention is to wrest cinema and posthumanist thought away from their exclusive reliance on Eurocentric frameworks, and thus pave the way for multiple and diverse imaginaries of thought. Such a questioning—of cinema’s very ontology and methodology—is bound to make for more fruitful connections between posthumanism, decolonialism, and cinema.
Despite the shift from a monument- or object-centred to a landscape-centred approach in the protection and management of urban cultural heritage, the analysis of cultural heritage as individual objects is still relevant. Theories on material culture do not see objects in the way they were conceived in monument-centred conservation. A case in point is fragmentation theory. The article uses this theory to analyse the relationship between archaeology and the urban landscape in Turku. Although fragmentation theory has its roots in prehistoric archaeology, the article adapts it to the modern, urban setting. Archaeological fragments have a physical connection with the past, but they can also act as agents independent of their original objects. This creative potential of fragments should be further explored in urban heritage management.
Argos is synonymous with plain, for this is the meaning of the term. Buried below the accumulated alluvium turned through centuries of agrarian labor, Bronze Age enclosures, Hellenistic temples, the streets of a Roman city emanate from below. In Argos, legion objects of forgotten eras nonetheless press ahead of their pasts to endure in other presents, and in working with them, from an archaeological perspective, we may find the makings of a very different time. This paper provides a topology of the city, a narrative where pleats and folds in its urban fabric provide points of connection for short vignettes—whether of polis exhibition culture, the crafting of myth, or lessons drawn from the ruins of antiquity—which, all together, build into a larger picture of temporality and religion in Argos, one sensitive to the intertwined, multi-temporal fabric of an agrarian city that arises from its namesake, the Argive plain.
This article offers a different way to understand the heritage of extractive industries by exploring the material afterlives of what has been termed the “ancillary impacts of resource development”—a variety of quarries, forest cuts, transportation corridors, and power lines that surround industrial operations, especially those created in areas distant from established industrial population centers. To study this, the article expands upon the concept of “vestige” to explore the landscapes around two single-industry mining towns in Kola Peninsula, Russia, and in Labrador, Canada, by specifically focusing on two abandoned quarries located in each. The results highlight the need to explore developments that trail behind industrial settlement of colonial hinterlands. By focusing specifically on the afterlives of such developments, the article demonstrates how chronological and geographical boundaries of resource extraction are blurred over time, creating a deep, unruly, self-perpetuating set of legacies.
Ever since Columbus mistook Cuba for Japan, Christian-Europeans have struggled to come to terms with their ancient terrestrial prejudices. With their repeated circumnavigations of the globe in the age of European land-appropriation, Early Modern, risk-taking mariners initiated an iterative process of revision where Earth, what for them had been experienced hitherto as predominately land-based, was reimagined as a waterworld (Schmitt [1942] 2015; also see Sloterdijk 2013, 40-46). The masterless ocean, upon which the sun never set, overran the terrestrial globe and through the new world pictures of this age (Heidegger 2002, 68), Europeans learned how what they called Earth would have been better named Oceanus. Long-distance engagements between sailors, ships, maps, instruments, new lands, and world-encompassing oceans teeming with creatures gave rise to a new sense of space that, as Carl Schmitt recognized ([1942] 2015), shaped a common consciousness and ushered in an epoch of profound economic, cultural, and political transformation. After the disclosure of the oceans’ true proportions, the boundless blue offered navigable routes for transportation, seemingly inexhaustible hunting grounds for whale oil and fish, a vast clandestine dump for the malefeasance of land-lubbers, and so much more. Of course, there are limits to how much terrestrial ignorance the maritime can absorb. Now human-induced alterations to and within the briny deep suggest a radical shift in relations, for we eight-billion humans entangled with trillions of other things now seem to rival the oceans themselves with a comparable collective agency. Let us register this new sense of proportionality. Given the planetary-wide challenges of global warming, ocean acidification, plastic pollution, widespread environmental degradation, and incomprehensible biodiversity loss spiraling into mass extinctions, the revelation of finitude with respect to the oceans and their bounty is perhaps of even greater scope than that of their sublime eminence, for it shatters all previous sensibilities shaped by the sea. If it seems like a tall order to connect changing definitions of the maritime, modern consciousness, ships, and the oceans themselves with the aftereffects of globalizations in the Anthropocene, then this is precisely what the present volume rather ambitiously seeks to accomplish.
Integrating political ecology and archaeology has resulted in innovative approaches for reconstructing past human-environment interactions and understanding the legacies that shape environmental degradation and resource struggles today. This paper contributes to this emerging interdisciplinarity by proposing a political ecological approach to investigate how archaeological remains are assigned value as resources, drawing on interpretive theories in both archaeology and political ecology. This article applies this approach to examine the archaeological imagination driving expeditions in eastern Honduras that aimed to find the remains of a site of monumental importance associated with the legend of the White City. Through a political ecological lens, it becomes clear that the interpretation of the region’s archaeological heritage within the context of a legend is the result of displacement and resource control dynamics. Although archaeologists reject the legend as a credible source, actors continue to exploit its symbolism for prestige and profit. This approach highlights the disjuncture between profit-driven narratives of archaeological heritage and the socio-natures that underpin our imagination of such sites. The paper suggests that engaging with the socio-nature of archaeological sites may lead to more inclusive and nuanced interpretations of the past, showing how political ecology can contribute to public archaeology.
The transdisciplinary practice of art/archaeology has been creating a new relationship between the worlds of archaeology and contemporary art. Created a new confluence, where archaeologists and/or artists leverage their research, creative and performative work, we argue that curating in art/archaeology will serve to expand new directions in the field of knowledge production. In this article, we analyse the international literature on this emerging topic, serving as a basis and method for discussing case studies. These case studies refer to examples of Portuguese contemporary artistic creation, namely from the collective Pedra no Rim and the artist João Gomes Gago. From the hypotheses raised by the literature on art/archaeology and its discussion through the selected case studies we highlight how ceramic materiality can serve as a curatorial case study to question the very definition of “archaeological artefact”. From the proposed processes (or methodologies) of proto-excavation and post-excavation, we (re)interpret these artefactual records, from new contemporary artistic formats, of mediation and resignification of a past that will be archaeological. We conclude that art/archaeological curatorship may have a fundamental role in questioning the very definition of “archaeological artefact” as a passive and immutable object or “thing”. That is, art/archaeological curatorship emphasizes the importance of individual perspectives and social and historical relations in the construction of the meaning of archaeological artifacts.
Dragos Gheorghiu (ed.), Art in the Archaeological ImaginationOxford: Oxbow Books, 2020. Paperback, 144 pp. ISBN: 9781789253528. £36.00.
Following Max Liboiron’s claim that pollution is colonialism, the anti-colonial maritime archaeologist’s role in the Anthropocene might be to reframe research questions, so that focus is directed toward interactions between marine and maritime, and that the colonial ‘resurrectionist’ approach that has dominated nautical archaeology ought to be reconsidered altogether. This normative statement is put to the test with a 4000-year-old waterlogged dugout canoe that was illegally excavated from the Cooper River in South Carolina, USA. Upon retrieval, the affected tribal entities were brought into consultation with archaeologists and conservators to help decide how to proceed with the canoe’s remains. Tribal representatives reached a consensus to preserve the canoe with PEG and display it in a public museum. This procedure follows the resurrectionist model typical of maritime archaeology in the West, now the dominant protocol globally, where the scholar acts as savior by lifting entire wrecks from watery graves and promising to grant them immortality in utopian museum spaces. However, this immortalizing procedure is at odds with some Indigenous values, voiced by tribal representatives, which embrace life cycles and distributed agency. In the end, the desire to preserve the canoe as a perpetual symbol of intertribal unity dominated concerns surrounding the canoe’s own life, spirit, and autonomy, and that plasticizing it would permanently alter its substance and essence. We argue that the object of the canoe has become subservient to its postcolonial symbolism of Indigenous unity, resilience, and resistance. Further, by subscribing to the resurrectionist model of maritime archaeology, the immortalized canoe now bears the irony of colonial metaphor, as an unintended consequence of its preservation. We echo Audre Lorde’s famous sentiment by wondering if an anticolonial maritime archaeology can ever hope to dismantle the master’s boat using the master’s tools. The conclusions reached here have implications for other maritime and museum contexts too, including the highly publicized case of the wrecked 1859–1860 slave ship, Clotilda.
The article focuses upon arts-based research in a dialogical unfolding of why art should be and can be integrated in academic work at present, and furthermore situates this development in broad context. The notion of scholartistry, hydrid scholarship-arts practice, is introduced by situating it in the academic literature on research methodology and through exemplification/demonstration - an imaginary exhibition of scholartistic artefacts. Several samples of arts-based research methods are discussed in terms of knowledge production and creative competencies. Connections are drawn with post-disciplinary agendas in the academy and beyond. The argument is made that a distinctive field of scholartistry offers an expansion of project and problem based learning in manifold cultural and organizational fields that are looking for open-ended creative modes of design and production.
American novelist Edith Wharton (1862-1937) is best known today for her tales of the city and the experiences of patrician New Yorkers in the “Gilded Age”. She does not seem to be a very obvious candidate for the type of academic scrutiny synonymous with “ecocriticism”. On university syllabi Wharton often features as a novelist of manners par excellence, whose fiction documents in coruscating detail the cossetted inhabitants of well-appointed libraries and drawing-rooms. My project seeks to push against the grain of critical orthodoxy by prioritizing other “species of spaces” in Wharton’s work. For example, how do Wharton’s narratives represent the organic profusion of external nature? Does the current scholarly fascination with the environmental humanities reveal previously unexamined or overlooked facets of Wharton’s craft? My Introduction proposes that what is most striking about her narrative practice is how she utilizes, adapts and translates pastoral tropes, conventions, and concerns to twentieth-century American actualities. It is no accident that Wharton portrays characters returning to, or exploring, various natural localities, such as private gardens, public parks, chic mountain resorts, monumental ruins, or country-estate “follies”. Such encounters and adventures prompt us to imagine new relationships with various geographies and the lifeforms that can be found there.
My first chapter – “The Pastoral Cosmopolitanism of the (not so) Secret Garden” – shows how some of Wharton’s moneyed, boundary-crossing characters yearn for a return to the native, the sheltered nook or the pastoral retreat. In so doing, Wharton invites us to reappraise “cosmopolitanism” as an analytic category. In her 1934 autobiography A Backward Glance, Wharton refers to her own literary production as her “secret garden”. What my chapter demonstrates is that the private park or the public garden becomes a site for staging (and engaging with) tensions between the cosmopolitan and the pastoral, the exotic and the endemic, elite and mass culture, the globe-trotting and the parochial.
The second chapter is entitled “‘Endless Plays of Mountain Forms’: Mapping the Mountains”. In a letter to Nicky Mariano on 31st May 1932, Wharton described the Sibylline Mountains thus: “The run today was indescribably beautiful, with changing skies & such endless plays of mountain forms”. Her response to the shape-shifting plasticity of this terrain is suggestive of the ways in which rocky peaks and summits operate in Wharton’s fiction more broadly. Her writing enterprise, I argue, evinces an abiding and acute fascination with the metaphorical, aesthetic and cultural aspects of mountains. By construing key Wharton texts through an ecocritical lens, I propose that her fictional summits and hills can be understood as “edgelands at an altitude”.
The third and final chapter – “Romantic Ruins? Edith Wharton’s Sedimented Vision” – addresses Wharton’s representation of the “ruin” as a space between the natural and the man-made. That monumental ruins and garden “follies” carry such affective and symbolic resonance in her oeuvre is owing partly to her incisive treatment of John Ruskin’s cultural theories, especially his powerful conception of the “voicefulness” of crumbling masonry, where the living and the dead seem to be in complex and eerie dialogue. Overall, then, Wharton’s oeuvre can be construed as a form of “imaginative archeology”, in which she excavates personal experience with a view to restructuring it in her fictions.
Gardening may seem worlds away from Nuraghi and brochs, but tending a garden is a long process involving patience, accretion and memory. Scholars argue that memories are also cultured, developed and regained. The monuments in Scotland and Sardinia are testament to the importance of memory and its role in maintaining social relations. This collection of twenty-one papers addresses the theme of memory anchored to the enduring presence of monuments, mainly from Scotland and Sardinia, but also from Central Europe and the Balkans.
This article proposes some potential contributions of contemporary art to industrial and technological heritage discussions. The paper analyses the relations among art, industrial ruins, technological trash, heritage, and society from an archaeological perspective, although this standpoint is compared to and complemented with those of art and art history. First, the text presents how industrial sites and technological artefacts from the recent past are transformed for/by the artists. In doing so, it offers a preliminary basic typology of art-obsolescence relations illustrated with cases from Europe, Asia and the Americas. Four major kinds of interactions are introduced: the conversion of abandoned industrial buildings into art galleries and museums; the transformation of larger obsolete industrial/technological areas into creative hubs; the intervention of artists in industrial ruins; and the creative recycling of technological waste. Second, the text infers from the examples provided in the typology three possible functions of art regarding heritage: revelation/addition of value; mediation between the public and dark heritages; and recognition in technological and industrial history. In the end, the paper defends the role of art in the making of industrial and technological heritages, as well as in reconnecting them to society.
A collective work of the researchers representing various academic disciplines, areas of expertise and fields of science as well as different generations, which aims to present interdisciplinarity as an essential element of research activity. The scholars share their experience and thoughts relating – directly or indirectly – to advantages and disadvantages of interdisciplinary practices.
Later prehistory in Eurasia is characterised by a suite of radical new technologies that include metallurgy, writing, and the wheel. Their emergence has often been attributed to the dramatically improved efficiencies they offer. This paper argues that instrumental accounts underplay the aesthetic qualities of technical action that have considerable bearing on how technologies emerge. In archaeology, the aesthetics of techniques finds limited recognition. Here, thinking on ‘cultural techniques’ from media theory, the French tradition in the anthropology of techniques, and notions of skill and learning from ecological psychology are combined to develop the aesthetic perspective required for exploring the relationship between technical action, the experience of technological wonder, and the formation of lasting infrastructures. The paper concludes that some emergent technologies create a convergence of different zones of activity, generating the growing infrastructural integration that characterises later Eurasian prehistory.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.