“The goal of descriptive adequacy is unattainable but continually haunts the endeavor, lying alongside, but in another time, and speaking back, like the immaterial ghosts of prophecy or the value of a currency.” (Maurer 2005, p. 54) What is it to describe? What ambitions and hopes do we attach to our descriptions? How do we…
anthropology
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…
Archaeologists should grapple with the anthropocene too…
In its complex reflexivities, its multiple feedback loops, and its inextricable entanglement of nature and culture, the anthropocene is a geological epoch like no other. The difficult task of understanding it should not be left entirely to biochemists, geologists, climatologists and other natural scientists. Archaeologists should grapple with the anthropocene too…..
An Archaeological Metaphysics of Care. On epistemography, heritage ecologies and the isotopy of the past(s)
A discussion yesterday with Bruno Latour, after his presentation “Manifesto for Compositionalism” at Oxford, hinged upon how we go about composing our collective world now that ‘nature’ is no longer an organizing category. The difficulty for analyses is that the modernist notion of nature supplied a related host of distinctions which we routinely call upon…
Four Stone Hearth: volume 21
The final throws of a new Ph.D.’s job search? No, this week Archaeolog hosts Four Stone Hearth and the next series of their blog carnival. The Fourth Stone Hearth is a “blog carnival that specializes in anthropology in the widest (American) sense of that word”. This carnival spans this four-field model, including submissions ranging from…
Open Source Archaeology and Heritage Ecologies? Taking ‘Yahoo!©s’ seriously at Teotihuacan, Mexico
A World Heritage site always attracts a lot of attention. Such archaeological sites are viewed to materially represent irreplaceable ‘heritage’ on a global scale and are defined and protected through the United Nations’ UNESCO declarations (eg. UNESCO 1988). Teotihuacan, Mexico is no exception. Replete with two monumental pyramids (the Pyramid of the Sun being the…