This academic year I am on sabbatical leave finishing three long-running projects and planning to focus more on applications of the archaeological imagination to matters of common and pressing contemporary concern, especially through design foresight and futures literacy. This is why I have put to one side my critical commentary on all things archaeological and…
fields of production
Archaeology through the Lens of Sherlock Holmes
There is always something to learn from Sherlock Holmes. It is a good sign that an archaeologist has been often identified with the private detective: The Sherlock Holmes type detective has become a common association with archaeology. Although the detective has been associated with other disciplines too […], the link with archaeology is nevertheless extremely…
Archaeological Description and Doubt
I wrote this paper for a session at the 2011 Meeting of the American Association of Anthropology in Montreal called Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Anthropology: What is the status of our descriptions? It is about time I posted it here. (Note 1) Archaeological description is rather peculiar. As we work at describing old…
Archaeolog.org: 2005 to 2011 to . . .
Timothy Webmoor and Christopher Witmore Last month archaeolog.org turned six years old. And in the blogging world this ripe old age is quite an accomplishment – a veritable geezer. But this birthday passed unacknowledged and in the midst of one of the longest dry spells in archaeolog.org’s history. Since 2005 we have been silent for…
Experimenting with the Dérive Experience of Landscapes
This is an excerpt from a portion of a paper entitled “Three Cities: thinking through embodied archaeologies with experiments in psychogeography and urban design” which I gave at TAG Berkeley back in May. The full version is available here: http://archaeologiesensoria.wordpress.com Three cities, three walks. During the Binchester excavations, I took three walks that purposefully mirrored…
Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Anthropology: What is the status of our descriptions?
“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…