- connections between the past and present
- disciplinary reflexivity and the history of archaeology
- the politics of archaeology
- archaeology as a mode of cultural production
- communities of archaeologists and their discipline
- temporality, history and historiography
Critique ...
reflection upon the conditions of possible knowledge, rational reconstruction of the conditions which make language, cognition and action possible
My main argument is that archaeologists work on the remains of the past, and their responsibility is to make clear the ethics and politics of this practice - for whom are they working and to what end.
This involves shifting the old model of the archaeologist as steward of the past (preserving the past) towards one that recognizes that the past is produced, with others - co-created - see collaboration and cocreation.
What is needed is not the preservation of the past, but the redemption of past hopes Adorno and Horkheimer
Old photo in a house near Örebro, Sweden
Publications
Social Theory and Archaeology Polity Press, 1987, University of New Mexico Press, 1988
ReConstructing Archaeology With Christopher Tilley. Cambridge University Press, 1987, Second edition: Routledge, 1992
Reading the signs. In I.Bapty and T.Yates (eds), Archaeology after Structuralism, London, Routledge, 1990
Archaeology into the 1990s. With Christopher Tilley. Norwegian Archaeological Review 22.1 (1989)
Experiencing the Past Routledge, 1991
Archaeological realities: embodiment and a critical romanticism. In M. Tusa and T. Kirkinen (eds) The Archaeologist and his/her Reality: Proceedings of the 4th Nordic TAG Conference, 1992, Helsinki, Department of Archaeology, 1995
Interpreting Archaeology: Finding Meaning in the Past Edited with Ian Hodder, Alexandra Alexandri, Victor Buchli, John Carman, Jonathan Last and Gavin Lucas. Routledge, 1995
The craft of archaeology. With Randall McGuire. American Antiquity 61: 75-88 (1996)
Classical Archaeology of Greece Routledge, 1996
Relativism, objectivity and the politics of the past. With the Lampeter Archaeology Workshop. Archaeological Dialogues 4: 164–184 (1997)
L’archéologie et le passé contemporain: un paradigme. In A. Schnapp (ed), Une Archéologie du Passé Récent? Paris, Fondation Maison des Sciences de L’Homme, 1997
And just about everything I have written since ...
