Archaeolog

Components for wind turbines at port in Nafplion, Greece.

Last Wednesday I attended a workshop at MIT entitled “Relocating innovation: Places and material practices of future making”. Convened by Lucy Suchman (in residence with the Department of Anthropology at MIT for the Spring of 2009), Endre Dányi and Laura Watts, all of the Centre for Science Studies at the University of Lancaster (http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/centres/css/), the workshop sought to critically engage with discourses of ‘innovation’ through the comparative juxtaposition of “three different sites of social, technological, and political future making”: Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Orkney, Scotland and the Hungarian Parliament. A basic premise of the workshop was that futures, or more precisely ‘future(s) making’, are located.

It helps to situate this premise—futures are located—by thinking about it historically. Thales in the shadow of the Great Pyramid, al-Haytham at Dar Al-Hekma, Edison in his laboratory Menlo Park, President Obama in the Oval Office; with each figure and site one encounters scenarios where horizons for substantial potentiality were designed. Whether we speak of geometry, optics, electricity or efficiency targets for the American Auto Industry, the practices undertaken with each site translated into futures that were made. (Of course, none of these futures were inevitable. The clinamen, Lucretius’ indeterminate swerve, is always a possibility.)

By centering our account upon these key figures, it is perhaps easy to see why popular culture persistently regards innovation as the province of the lone genius. However, Suchman, Dányi and Watts are much more cautious. Future(s) making, as the workshop sought to probe in more depth, is shaped by heterogeneous network of entities, contestations, utterly specific qualities of place and culturally oriented material practices. With each site of future(s) making one also encounters innovation at work.

Continue reading "Innovation, future(s) making and archaeology " »

Posted by Christopher Witmore at 7:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The first time I TAed an archaeology class, we began by having our students draw a picture of an archaeologist. The result was predictable: a pile of comically bad drawings of Indiana Jones, leavened with a few nerdy-looking academic characters. That semester, we went on a mission to wipe this image out of our students’ minds, and replace it with the silhouettes of Lewis Binford and Ian Hodder.

The ghost of Indy is hard to stamp out. Everywhere archaeologists gather, we complain about how archaeology is portrayed in pop culture: it’s sensationalistic, cheesy, misleading, schlocky! It gives people the wrong impression of what archaeology is.

This last existential verb is the source of our trouble. We archaeologists know what archaeology is, and refuse to let anyone define it except us. But the cat has always been out of the bag: archaeology has cast a giant shadow on the public imagination from the moment it first emerged as a profession. And the nature of shadows is to distort, and shift, and show us what we want to see. On that note, I offer you two propositions about the discipline.

1) In the popular imagination, archaeology is a form of science fiction.
2) Archaeologists should embrace this, and start writing science fiction that promotes their vision of the past and agenda for the present.

You heard that right: for most people, archaeology is just a flavor of science fiction. And that’s not a bad thing. If this has made your head start rotating and shooting deadly laser beams, take a deep breath before reading further.

Continue reading "Archaeology, Science Fiction, and Pop Culture" »

Posted by Dan Shoup at 7:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Colleen Morgan, University of California, Berkeley

At first, I was at a loss. Earlier in the week I had stated my intention to twitter the Stanford meeting of the Theoretical Archaeology Group on my blog, but there I was, standing outside the door of a conference room, wondering what exactly I should write. Twitter is a social networking site that allows users to send messages to their 'followers' in short, 140 character-long statements. These statements can be read online or sent automatically as a text message to your cellphone. Out of curiosity I signed up for Twitter in April of 2007, but didn't use the service much, as I didn't know anyone else who was using it at the time. Since then, Twitter has grown precipitously, with famous users such as Tina Fey, Oprah Winfrey, Hugh Jackman and President Obama (who has been rather quiet lately) updating their subscribers on subjects ranging from world policy to food preferences--Tina Fey ate a Caramello bar for lunch on February 3rd, in case you were wondering. I find Twitter useful primarily to join in a broader conversation during specific events; Twitter is nearly indispensable during South by Southwest, a large music, film, and interactive conference where I was a guest speaker on an archaeology panel last March. People attending the conference could use hashtags, a method of tagging updates that makes it possible to search for event and topic-specific commentary. I was able to find reactions to our panel discussion by searching for archaeology under the #SXSW hashtag and was happy to see that our discussion of virtual reconstructions and the archive were well-received by the technologists in the audience.

But was this technology ready to come to an archaeology conference? As the social networking coordinator for the World Archaeological Congress, I intended to user Twitter last July at the WAC Congress in Dublin. Unfortunately international calling and texting rates made this impossible, so I was eager to test out the utility closer to home, in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Continue reading "Twittering TAG 2009" »

Posted by Colleen Morgan at 4:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Things are in the limelight. Fresh in the wake of TAG US where the plenary session was focused on the Future of Things, two announcements came through the CHAT (Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory) listserv this past week for thing-oriented conferences/sessions. CHAT 2009 and What's the 'Matter' in Anthropology, both set in Oxford, are taking up the call for things. This is a refreshing state of affairs.

The call to take things seriously has been an important agenda at the heart of what has been called a symmetrical archaeology (González-Ruibal 2007; Olsen 2007; Shanks 2007; Webmoor 2007; Witmore 2007).

Symmetry is an awkward term. It is part of an admittedly poor, but necessary, vocabulary meant to help us move from a very problematic rendering of reality to a hopefully more refreshing and interesting one. The "symmetrical" is simply meant to remind us not to assume the nature of relations between, for example, boundary cairns, arbitration inscriptions, and the governance of Greek poleis by imposing an asymmetric scheme based upon a discord between intentional social players and objective matter.

This is not to say asymmetries don’t exist. There are after all winners and losers throughout history. It is simply to say the asymmetries are not to be oriented along any preformed opposition between humans and nonhumans. This move requires hard work, much of which is yet to be accomplished. Here, it is important to note that significant work is already occurring in many areas across archaeology (see, for example, the contributions to Edgeworth 2006; Jorge and Thomas 2007; Knappett and Malafouris 2008).

As to be expected, many quibbles have been raised with the “symmetrical” agenda. I would like us to address two of these here: 1) the question of disciplinary commitment with respect to theory and; 2) reactions to the rhetorical subtext “the discipline of things”. These cavils were raised at TAG US and in one of the many interesting abstracts from the upcoming Centenary Conference of the Oxford University Anthropological Society, What's the 'Matter' in Anthropology; both criticisms rest upon some basic misunderstandings.

Continue reading "Symmetrical archaeology: Two clarifications" »

Posted by Christopher Witmore at 5:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Ömür Harmanşah, Brown University

"Animals, who exhibit life in highly concentrated and diverse forms, have the power to completely alter our way of thinking about ourselves and the forms we make, live in, and respond to..." (Ingraham 2006: 15)

"In some way we recognize as true, nature and culture both share and compete for space, although only culture "stages" space, which frequently gives it the advantage. Sharing space means there exists, between the human world of labor and production and the "simply appearing" nature, an often fantastical but compelling potential for crossovers, associations, and contaminations." (Ingraham 2006: 188)

I have been meaning to write about this memorable place as a case study to illustrate the intricate but ambivalent relationship between archaeological "sites" and real "places". I participated in the Kerkenes Dağ Archaeological Project in Yozgat Province of Turkey, near the town Sorgun, in the territory of the village Şahmuratlı, for many seasons as an architect and architectural historian. Along with Isthmia in Greece, this was where my teeth were cut in archaeological fieldwork. Kerkenes is a mountain-top Iron Age city to the East of Central Anatolian plateau, also identified with the sacred mountain "Daha" of Hittite sources (Gurney 1995). It is one of the largest cities ever built in ancient Anatolia. Its fortification walls stretch some 7 km. Built at a very high altitude (ca. 1500 m), it covers a substantial area of some 271 ha.

The site today is a highland cattle and sheep pasture for the surrounding villages. This is mostly true of the village of Şahmuratlı, where the project team stayed. The village had given the project an old unused school building which we collaboratively transformed into a dig house over the years (no small feat!). I remember sleeping in the first few seasons in this massive lecture hall on collapsible metal camp beds. Work transpired on a massive wooden bobbin (for electric wires), which we had amusingly carried inside. I have so many good memories of this place.

Continue reading "The Leech Pond at Kerkenes Dağ" »

Posted by Ömür Harmansah at 7:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Roderick Campbell (Brown University)

It is striking how many recent archaeological titles begin with the words “The Archaeology of …” or more pluralistically, “Archaeologies of …”. While the use of “archaeology” in the titles of books by archaeologists might seem to be fairly self-evident and reasonable, there is something slightly defensive, slightly insecure about the need to constantly wave the disciplinary flag. Moreover, I would argue, the potential problems inherent in this boundary marking exercise, come most clearly to the fore when the “…” of “The Archaeology of …” is some large inter-disciplinary topic like “religion”, “war”, “sacrifice”, etc. In these cases, the maneuvers that claim a piece of these territories for archaeology often include the application of a strict definition of “…” followed by methodological recipes for digging up this now reified intangible. Now this is not to say that methodological work is unimportant or that archaeologists shouldn’t pragmatically search for ways in which given phenomena might be reflected in the “material record”. This danger lies rather in the tendency to simplify and objectify in the service of finding “facts in the ground”. Starting from the limited territory claimed for archaeology in brandishing materiality frequently forecloses the possibility of understanding the full complexity or significance of the matter at hand. A more productive approach might begin with a transdisciplinary attempt to grapple with the untamed complexity of topics such as “religion”, “memory” or “violence” saving the question of how one pursues them archaeologically till after a better sense is reached of their potential social, material, political and inter-subjective entanglements.

Continue reading "The Archaeology of … and the Immateriality of Violence" »

Posted by Roderick Campbell at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

By Bradley M. Sekedat, Brown University

This edited volume is about a lot of things; so many things, in fact, that creating a summary of its component parts proves somewhat difficult for a brief review. Based on the introductory chapter, however, this difficulty seems intentional or, at the very least, acknowledged by the editors, who develop the structure of the book around the recognition that the methodologies employed in ‘landscape archaeology’ are both diverse and situated. The result is a book with case studies from all over the world: Northern Ireland, the East African coast, Manhattan, Botswana, Central Europe, Atlantic Africa, Greece, Annapolis and the Caribbean. These case studies emphasize culturally specific perspectives and cover a range of important issues from power, perspective, imagined landscapes and time to political economy, vision, creation, interpretation, heritage, utility and more. This book succeeds in pulling together a diverse array of archaeological work pertaining to landscape in a single, manageable volume. The global scope of the book sets it apart from the majority of studies in landscape archaeology, which tend to be region specific. While notable exceptions include Bender (1993) and Ashmore and Knapp (1999), more typical of recent scholarship is a region-specific emphasis, such as the five POPULUS volumes on landscape archaeology in the Mediterranean, the publication of the Side-By-Side conference on the comparability of Mediterranean survey projects (Alcock and Cherry 2004), the Broadening Horizons (Ooghe and Verhoeven 2007) volume on multidisciplinary landscape practices in the Mediterranean and the Near East, or the Damaged Landscapes symposium at the 2008 meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America. Hicks et al., then, usefully force the reader to engage with the comparability of landscape studies on a global scale appropriate for a World Archaeology Congress (WAC) volume. On the other hand, the book suffers from a lack of specificity, struggling at times to justify its breadth. It almost completely misses an opportunity to push the discussion of ‘landscape’ and ‘landscape archaeology’ into new territory.

Continue reading "Hicks, D., McAtackney, L. and Fairclough, G. 2007. Envisioning Landscape: Situations and Standpoints in Archaeology and Heritage. Walnut Creek: Left Coast " »

Posted by Bradley Sekedat at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

by Elissa Z. Faro (Dartmouth College)

January 20, 2009. On this historic day, when Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States of America, the issues that Hamilakis considers in this book – the relationship between the modern nation-state and its historical and material past – resonate anew.

Hamilakis’ book aims to address a number of themes that, although discussed in terms of Greece and Greek antiquities, are current issues that concern the larger archaeological and anthropological world. He aims to explore, problematize, and re-examine the concept of archaeology as the practice of producing meanings out of material traces of the past; the concept of national imagination and its relationship with the concept of modernity. For me, as an archaeologist who primarily works in Greece, this book struck a special chord for my own research and fieldwork. At the same time, it triggered many thoughts, responses, and reflections about my own and other’s work in different periods, different regions, and in different developing nations of the world. Below, I will discuss how Hamilakis approaches the complex network of relationships between archaeologists, citizens, politicians, and the larger global world.

Hamilakis’ over-arching framework is based on his view of nationalism, which he sees as a cultural system, an ideology, an ontology, and even the social dreams of a people. In the introductory chapter, he states explicitly that “the book explores the key position of the ancient Greek (mostly Classical) heritage and its material manifestations in the lives, imagination, experiences, anxieties, and hopes of people in Greece” (7). Employing a primarily anthropological methodology – a “multi-sited historical and archaeological ethnography” (cf. Marcus 1995, 1998) – this book tackles issues such as stakeholdership in the past, colonialism, consumerism, and national identity.

Continue reading "A Response to The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece (2007) by Yannis Hamilakis. Oxford: Oxford University Press." »

Posted by Elissa Z. Faro at 7:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A review of 'The Earth after us: what legacy will humans leave in the rocks?' by Jan Zalasiewicz. Oxford, Oxford University Press. 2008.

The view of the Earth from the Moon on the front of the book seems both familiar and strange at the same time. The blue jewel of a planet is recognisably ‘home’, only a few decades since space travel first made such a perspective possible. But look again and an important difference is noticed. The continents are the wrong shape, and in the wrong configuration. Is this a view of our planet in the distant past? No, this is the Earth as it is imagined to be 100 million years into the future.

Geologist Jan Zalasiewicz invites the reader to take a step in the scientific imagination far greater than that involved in looking at the Earth from the Moon. For the challenge taken up by the book is to look back at human civilization from a vantage point in time long after the human species itself has disappeared, through observations made by alien beings visiting the planet for the first time. Seeking to understand the geological strata encountered, the alien scientists soon realise that something significant happened 100 million years ago, comparable to the meteorite strike that wiped out the dinosaurs even further back in the Earth’s past. Even before they discover it, they deduce the existence of an event horizon, separating two major geological epochs – an event that triggered massive climate change and extinctions of species evident in strata from later periods. Following a trail of clues, they discover the Human Event Stratum.

The Human Event Stratum may vary from a thin sliver to several metres in thickness, sandwiched between layers of sandstone and shale. Parts of it will have been destroyed by erosion or other geological processes. It is mostly buried, hundreds of metres under the ground, but in places it has been pushed up or exposed by geological forces to outbreak on the surface. Ever wondered what will survive, millions of years hence, of our railway networks, skyscrapers, motorways and rubbish dumps? What about trains and cars, or smaller artefacts like mobile phones and ballpoint pens? Such are the questions which the book poses. In this review I consider briefly some of the implications this book has for contemporary archaeology.

Continue reading "The Earth After Us" »

Posted by Matt Edgeworth at 5:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A review of Laurent Olivier: Le sombre abîme du temps. Mémoire et archéologie.
Seuil, Paris, 2008.

French theory has had an enormous impact across the social and human sciences during the last forty years. We may hardly understand global trends in archaeology, history or anthropology without structuralism, post-structuralism or the Annales school. One may, thus, wonder why French archaeology has remained mainly untouched by the theoretical paradigms developed in the same country. The truth is that although archaeology in France has not been characterized in general for its theoretical contributions, there is a small but important group of archaeologists whose commitment to theory is out of the question. This group includes, among others, André Leroi-Gourhan, Alain Schnapp, Anick Coudart and Jean-Pierre Demoule. Although not an archaeologist, we should include here Pierre Lemonnier, whose work on the anthropology of technology has been highly influential in archaeology. Laurent Olivier is a member of this select community and the book that is reviewed here will grant him a privileged position not only within the national community of archaeological theorists, but certainly within the world of archaeological thinkers in general.

Olivier’s book is ambitious: he basically proposes to no less than rethink archaeology – a task, until now, mostly reserved to Anglo-Saxon scholars – through a reflection on time. His critical analysis, however, goes well beyond the discipline and cuts to the heart of history. Actually, the main enemy of Olivier is historicism. With its sequential, homogeneous and unilinear rendering of time, historicism has prevailed in the historical sciences. Historicism is what truly kills archaeology and makes it “despairingly superficial” (p. 53): if archaeology wants to be a relevant science, it has to stop resorting to the flawed temporalities of traditional historiography. His critical undertaking leads him to revisit inherited concepts of archaeological practice (including typology and excavation), heritage, and the history of archaeology. In his journey, he finds unexpected allies in people as desperate as Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Aby Warburg and Georges Perec.

Continue reading "The Dark Abyss of Time." »

Posted by Alfredo Gonzalez Ruibal at 6:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Reviewed by Parker VanValkenburgh, Harvard University

In 1991, social anthropologist Orin Starn accused Andeanist anthropologists of “missing the revolution” – essentially, of failing to consider that a movement like the Sendero Luminoso Maoist insurgency (The Shining Path) could emerge in a rural, primarily indigenous area of Peru. Starn was particularly critical of the work of Billie Jean Isbell, whose book To Defend Ourselves (1978) chronicled life in the same village (Chuschi, Ayacucho department) where Sendero announced itself to the world by burning ballot boxes during an election in 1980. By focusing on “traditional” culture rather than contemporary socio-economic conditions, anthropologists in general, and Isbell in particular, had “portray[ed] contemporary highland peasants as outside the flow of modern history” (1991: 64). Starn saw this tendency to romanticize and essentialize the Otherness of Andean peoples as a regional manifestation of Orientalism (Said 1978), and so he called it “Andeanism.” Today, most Andeanists know it as the problem of lo Andino (THE Andean).

Continue reading "Review: "Heads of State: Icons, Power and Politics in the Ancient and Modern Andes", by Denise Y. Arnold and Christine A. Hastorf. Left Coast Press, 2008." »

Posted by Parker VanValkenburgh at 9:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

by Barbara Bender, Sue Hamilton and Christopher Tilley, 2007 Left Coast Press, 437 pages + notes, bibliography

This is an innovative and creative book. These are its best qualities. The book is also ambitious, the authors setting themselves the task of both complying with the “archaeological morality” (269) of publishing the results of field investigations, and conveying the experience of working at Leskernick on Bodmin Moor, Cornwall. To do this, the authors have experimented with form and content. And while their citational circle does not extend to media studies (where, I would suggest, they would find inspiration and edification), the book exemplifies Marshall McLuhan’s famous adage: the medium is the message. Reviewing experimental work, criticism rather than accolade comes easier, partly because the novelty excludes easy comparative evaluation. So I think it important to underscore that being innovative and taking risks, even though you may be safely tenured scholars, should be commended. It creates discussion, fosters debate, stirs emotion, and motivates colleagues to work harder. It disrupts our insulated routines of scholarly production. It is, unfortunately, all too rare.

The collaborative effort of the Leskernick project, steered by Barbara Bender, Sue Hamilton and Christopher Tilley, bends the parameters of analogue publication to transcend traditional site reports. The reader will not find neat topical divisions, no ‘introduction’, ‘background’ (limited to environmental characteristics and a few weather stats), ‘results’, ‘discussion’ or ‘significance’, followed by add on (and on and on) appendices. And with few exceptions, it does not resemble any other field project’s publication in archaeology - a most welcome intervention in academic publication.

There is a structure, however, with the book divided into four parts. Part One somewhat approximates a conventional ‘introducing the site’. Goals for the project are laid out, the setting and unique “awe and mystery” of the rocky hill where Leskernick is situated are conveyed, and the authors quickly dispel any notion that this will be a conventional report focused upon an archaeological site. By the time they conclude Chapter 1 stating that “we stand with the Leskernick people at the centre of their world” (35), the reader can expect to share an intimacy that will bring her to the edge of being an ‘insider’ of the project (cf. 266). We then receive an orienting tour of the site, followed by Chapter 3’s methodology. Part Two encompasses the ‘real’ archaeological information. If one were after conventional details, Chapters 4-7 are where we glean the details about Bronze Age Leskernick gathered through the excavation of 400 square meters of area, and the survey of every house and field enclosure on Leskernick Hill. A rough chronology, pegged to the radiocarbon dates in Table 4.1 (88-89), develops. Initially there were the earliest stone rows and circles, with the most spectacular "Propped Stone” and its summer solstice alignment dating to as early as the Neolithic. Then, in the hill’s clitter of stones, a growing population of 100-200 people, or eight to sixteen families, built their houses and field enclosures during the Middle Bronze Age and supported a pastoral economy (138). There is disagreement about whether these people inhabited Leskernick year round or only seasonally, though the directors favor the former scenario. Then there is a decrease in the number of families, leaving the hill with perhaps only 60 inhabitants. Then a gradual abandonment of the dwellings and the hill until much later medieval visitation and re-use. It is the narrative of part of the life-cycle of a landscape.

The book could have ended here with the conclusion of Chapter 7. But this book is not really about archaeology . . .

Continue reading "Review of Stone Worlds: narrative and reflexivity in landscape archaeology" »

Posted by Timothy Webmoor at 8:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

UCD Scholarcast has released a podcast series featuring highlights from the Sixth World Archaeological Congress’ theme ‘Archaeologies of Art’. Edited by Ian Russell, the series features contributions from Douglass Bailey (San Francisco State University), Blaze O’Connor (University College Dublin), Andrew Cochrane (Cardiff University) and Kevin O’Dwyer (WAC6 Artist-in-Residence). The series responds broadly to the themes raised by the Abhar agus Meon exhibition series hosted at WAC 6.

The series can be downloaded here: http://www.ucd.ie/scholarcast/series2.html

Posted by Andrew Cochrane and Ian Russell at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sara Perry (University of Southampton)

Enquiry into the epistemological implications of visual representation in the sciences has been ongoing for decades now, as historians, philosophers, and disciplinary specialists have increasingly come to challenge the often taken-for-granted nature of scientific practices of pictorialisation. Archaeologists, in particular, have become progressively more familiar with the tensions at the heart of the visual communication of knowledge (e.g., see Molyneaux 1997, Moser 1998, Smiles and Moser 2005), but the number of forums open to practitioners to pursue and develop such study have tended to be few and far between.

The newly-launched Visualisation in Archaeology (VIA) project endeavours to redress this predicament. Connecting researchers through its web platform, its annual workshops, an international conference scheduled for 2010, its online bibliography and research showcase, and various related outputs, VIA aims to inform professional standards around pictorial practice, investigate viable guidelines for imaging, and, in so doing, articulate an intellectual framework for the visualisation of archaeological data.

Contributors to VIA's 2008 Workshop pose for a photo at the University of Southampton, UK. Courtesy of Colleen Morgan.

The first of VIA’s three annual workshops was held over two days this past October (23-24 October 2008) at the Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton. The Visualisation and Knowledge Formation-themed event brought together representatives from the scholarly, private and public sectors to discuss and debate the historical and philosophical dimensions -- and future possibilities -- of the visual representation of knowledge in archaeology (and beyond). With contributions from British, Australian, German, Swedish, Portuguese, French, Danish, and North American practitioners, the workshop strived to engender conceptual reflection and to create an open network of dialogue, critique and visuality-related information sharing across countries and disciplines. Details on participants and papers presented at the event can be accessed online at www.viarch.org.uk.

As VIA’s organisers endeavour to formulate strategies for the dissemination of the 2008 workshop results, planning is currently underway for next year’s workshop at the University of Southampton, tentatively set for October 2009. The call for papers will be posted on VIA’s webpages in the near future -- as will information on the outputs of the 2008 workshop. Please visit the website for updates and to read more about the project, its goals and its various components and contributors.

References

Molyneaux, B. L. (ed.) 1997. The Cultural Life of Images: Visual Representation in Archaeology. London: Routledge.

Moser, S. 1998. Ancestral Images: The Iconography of Human Origins. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Smiles, S. and Moser, S. (eds.) 2005. Envisioning the Past: Archaeology and the Image. Malden: Blackwell.

Posted by Sara Perry at 7:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Ian Straughn (Brown University)

I. Foreclosure Alley and the trash stream

Familiar are the images of the victims from hurricanes, earthquakes, fires and other natural and man-made disasters salvaging what they can from the ruins of their houses. Those items, whether sentimental mementos or the practical things of every day use, constitute the starting point, resources from which to build again and reverse the processes of destruction that have unwittingly taken hold. What happens when the decision is not to resist ruin whether by conscious decision or the force of circumstances? Is this the point where the archaeological record takes hold; is this the moment of its beginning?

Late this September as the current financial crisis was beginning to fully unravel correspondent Lisa Ling of SoCal Connected aired a story entitled “Foreclosure Alley” which describes some of the messy details of the collapsing housing bubble gripping much of California’s “inland empire” along interstate 15. The report documented the work of a crew hired by the bank to prepare a recently foreclosed property for a short sale in an effort to staunch the bleeding that these profligate lenders have come to experience. We watch as four men engage in what they call a “trash out” in which all manner of material culture is removed from the abandoned property for disposal in the nearest landfill. Such a clean-up would seem hardly the stuff of investigative journalism and attention grabbing web-TV were it not for the fact that the particular house being “trashed-out” is hardly filled with garbage; instead it still houses all manner of good quality consumer goods that appear well maintained. Big-screen tvs, computers, furniture, family photos, personal documents, cabinets filled-with food not yet starting to molder, are all part of a well decorated vision of suburban middle-class America frozen in its Pompeiian moment. The crew chief speculates that whoever owned these items probably could not find the money for a truck and storage unit. Our correspondent opines about the many families facing foreclosure who find themselves in spirals of depression that may cloud their judgment and ability to rationally handle the situation. This is echoed in the reflections of Paul Reyes, who comments in a recent article for Harper’s about his experience working the crew of his father’s junk removal business. He writes: “each excavation [is] a peek into a state of mind, like dismantling some diorama of dejection” (Reyes 2008).

Continue reading "“Trashed Out”: An archaeological reading of the foreclosure mess" »

Posted by Ian Straughn at 6:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)