Archaeologies of Memory: An Introduction (original) (raw)
2003, Archaeologies of Memory
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This collection of essays explores the relationship between archaeology and memory across diverse cultures and time periods. It examines how past societies constructed their identities and legitimized social authority through their interactions with remnants of their history, showcasing case studies from the American Southwest to southern India and emphasizing the importance of interpreting these past uses of memory within contemporary archaeological discourse.
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Annual Review of Anthropology, 2019
This review provides a road map through current trends and issues in archaeological studies of memory. Many scholars continue to draw on Halbwachs for collective memory studies, emphasizing how the past can legitimate political authority. Others are inspired by Bergson, focusing on the persistent material intrusion of the past into the present. "Past in the past" studies are particularly widespread in the Near East/Classical world, Europe, the Maya region, and Native North America. Archaeologists have viewed materialized memory in various ways: as passively continuous, discursively referenced, intentionally invented, obliterated. Key domains of inquiry include monuments , places, and lieux de mémoire; treatment and disposal of the dead; habitual practices and senses; the recent and contemporary past; and forgetting and erasure. Important contemporary work deploys archaeology as a tool of counter-memory in the aftermath of recent violence and trauma. 207
Understanding the Past Through Indigenous Knowledge and Archaeological Research
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Experiencing the Past: On the Character of Archaeology
Routledge, 1992
All things archaeological - from archaeological method, the connections between archaeology and modernity, through a process-relational paradigm, to the heritage industry and archaeology as a mode of cultural production, with an outline of archaeology as craft. Overall it is an exploration of the archaeological imagination, as I called it when I was at University Wales Lampeter, with archaeology a relationship between the remains of the past and present interests. I wrote this book while still making my way into archaeology - it brought together what I had been saying with Chris Tilley in the 1980s with a personal vision of what the archaeogical past means to many people now. The book takes risks with experimental writing and imaging, including eidetics and collage. Twenty five years after publication it is pleasing to see that much of what I was writing about then has come to figure significantly in archaeological thinking: — the book is a kind of analysis of the discourse of archaeology and exemplifies an interest in how the past may be mediated - written and visualized - imagery, simulation, narrative — the book argues for an extension of archaeological interest to include the contemporary world - archaeologies of the contemporary past, with a particular focus upon the convergence of archaeology and contemporary art — in this the book deals with archaeology's cultural associations with modernity - horror fiction to gardening, forensics to fakery — the cultural politics of archaeology are revealed through an ethnography of archaeology, archaeologists and those with archaeological interests the book argues for a new conception of heritage - not academic disdain for popular interest in the remains of the past, but a celebration of certain kinds of actuality that embody creative relationships with the past — rather than have archaeology only engaged in explaining and interpreting the past, the book argues for a post-interpretive turn to take us beyond epistemology into work upon the materiality of the past - ontologies of relationship between past and present — this means thinking about the materiality of cultural experience and its embodiment - a focus on experiences past and present in a process-relational paradigm related to a reading of Nietzsche, Bergson, Adorno's negative dialectics, and Deleuze's nomadics.
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The authority of archaeologists and museums over the retention of the archaeological heritage and the interpretation of the past has been based on a particular conception of knowledge that developed in the European Enlightenment, from which both archaeology and museums sprang. Institutionalised archaeology has, in general, not loosened its control over the archaeological heritage. The paper explores the philosophy and practice of archaeological institutions (including museums) and asks how they might share or cede authority and control, working in association with groups that acknowledge different types of knowledge and challenge the authority of those institutions both to retain certain objects and to tell particular stories in a particular way.
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