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.

Archaeologists in the Movies

Hollywood’s offerings in the last decade divide roughly into stories set in the past and stories about archaeologists. I’ll focus on the latter here – but point out in passing that there are usually only cosmetic differences between an action movie set in the future (The Matrix, Starship Troopers, Alien, Terminator) and one set in the past (300, Troy, Alexander). The films about archaeologists themselves, however, are the ones that have given Hollywood durable, lucrative, and influential franchises.

Last year, for instance, we were graced with the latest installments of the Mummy and Indiana Jones franchises. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor takes the template of 2001’s The Scorpion King and transplants it a bit further east. Explorer Rick O’Connell (Brendan Fraser) must defeat the resurrected first emperor of China, who attempts to use his magical powers to animate his terracotta army and conquer the world. The ancient evil is (of course!) awakened by an archaeologist, in this case Rick’s son Alex. To restore order to the universe, Rick and his Egyptologist wife Evelyn journey to Shangri-La, huge undead armies fight, and the evil emperor (played by Jet Li and based very loosely on Qin Shi Huang [259-210BC]) is defeated. (The lack of any actual mummy in the story is, of course, no impediment at all to the plot.)

The latest offering in the Indiana Jones series chooses an explicitly Sci-Fi flavor over The Mummy’s horror-fantasy blend. For some unfathomable reason, George Lucas chose to structure the whole movie around artifacts – the crystal skulls – that are well-known and notorious fakes. Then he decided to up the ante by making them the skeletons of aliens. Set in 1957, the plot revolves around a nefarious Soviet plot to use crystal skulls to develop an advantage in psychic warfare. The film is a rich buffet of science fiction tropes: flying saucers, interdimensional travel, psychic powers and an ancient temple full of alien bodies. I can’t decide if it was just a fun caper movie, or is the latest evidence of George Lucas’ creative senility. Probably both.

National Treasure: Book of Secrets (2007), sees Nic Cage deploying some of the same tropes in a less sensational context. His character, Benjamin Gates, is a cryptologist and treasure hunter (his mother is the film’s token archaeologist), and he must solve a series of historical mysteries that poses an existential threat to American identity. Unsurprisingly, the trail leads to the discovery of the “ancient city of gold”, Cibola, which is amusingly located inside Mount Rushmore. It’s a frenetic romp with all the required elements: sinister villains, ancient mysteries, a vigorous, heroic explorer, and a resolution that restores order to the world.

These films don’t just loosely connect archaeology with science fiction – instead, archaeology is the sine qua non of the speculative universe that the film explores. There is a causal relationship between archaeology and fantasy: the archaeologist/explorer/treasure hunter character unleashes weirdness into the world and then must fix the problems that result.

Archaeologists can’t just dismiss these movies, which are all just the latest sequels in franchises with global reach and billions of dollars in earnings. And in fact, there’s lots to like here. Time travel, magic, the undead, war with exotic weapons, evil rulers, aliens, and ancient gods are the window dressing around a similar formula: the past contains powerful mysteries, these mysteries are supernatural and pose an existential threat to human existence, and only the special knowledge and abilities of the archaeologist-explorer can nullify the threat and restore order to the universe.

It’s an empowering metaphor. The archaeologist acts as a wizard, ensuring that the magical powers of ancient artifacts do not disrupt society, and restoring order when they do. The past is a source of deep disturbances to the collective psyche, and archaeologists are the only ones who can fix them. No wonder that despite our classroom crusade, we never could bring ourselves to take down the Indiana Jones poster in the TA office: who doesn’t want that kind of power?

The History Channel

You’d think that compared to these Hollywood quests, the History Channel would be, well, more historical. But if you’re a reader of ‘serious’ history, the lineup of shows seems insane and cretinous at first glance. UFOs? Ancient Mysteries? Ice Road Truckers? Jurassic Fight Club? What the hell is going on?

But there is a logic here, just not the one you might expect. The way that the History Channel deploys the past reflects how archaeology works in the public imagination. Its offerings fall into three main categories: figuring out hidden truths, reclaiming things that are lost, and extremes (of distance, time, and size).

These elements are regularly combined: this month, The Lost Pyramid will examine whether the now-vanished pyramid of Djedefre was really the biggest ever, and what happened to it. Lost? Check. Real big? Check. More ‘lost’ elements of the past are explored in Ancient Discoveries, which focuses on technologies from the ancient world. Recent episodes and webisodes have featured flamethrowers, rocket cars, explosives, ancient mining technology, Da Vinci’s helicopter prototypes, Caligula’s giant ships, and the first “robots”. Fun stuff that engages the fascination with firsts – but also projects a love of futuristic technology deep into the past.

Among the better offerings is Cities of the Underworld, hosted by the amazingly-named “Don Wildman”, an actor, one-time spokesman for Oreo cookies, and former host of an ESPN adventure show. His current show looks for hidden truths in underground places. One of this season’s episodes, for instance, focuses on medieval labyrinths:

Europe was plunged into chaos for centuries, with mass bloodshed, rampant disease, and vicious carnage regularly raging through the streets. But below them, another world was carved out to keep the people alive...and enemies on their toes.

Others explore the historical roots of the Mafia, the construction of Vegas, and Hitler’s Bunker. Webisodes currently on the site ask other probing historical questions about the Maya Calendar (“will the world end December 21, 2012? Don tries to find out”) and Irish myth (“Don takes us to Ireland to see whether Banshees really exist”). It’s fun to watch, and tries hard to use historical data as the basis of Don’s adventures.

Other shows are more obviously pseudoscience, like “UFO Hunters” or “MonsterQuest”. You might be tempted to argue that these shows actually have nothing at all to do with the past. I used to myself: the first time I flipped on the History Channel and saw a gripping examination of the different possible locations of Atlantis, I was left shaking with anger. But that reaction was based on a totally mistaken understanding of what these shows are trying to do.

The History Channel isn’t trying to present linear historical narratives based on archaeological or historical data. Instead, it starts from the perspective of ordinary people, who look to history to help them expand the limits of their world. The viewers want to be scared, titillated, and amazed; taken out of themselves and then brought back again. They want Heinlein’s “realistic speculation about possible future [and past] events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world”. UFOs, Caligula, giant snakes, Templar labyrinths, and Las Vegas make perfect sense together if you understand them as devices that stretch the edges of reality in plausible ways. Understood as science fiction, the History Channel’s lineup is perfectly logical.

The new show "Life After People" perfectly captures what I’m talking about. It explores what the world will be like after the disappearance of humanity. The science fiction premise allows us to explore archaeological processes – the collapse of buildings, the decay of bodies, ecological succession in abandoned urban spaces. It’s a superb way of making important archaeological questions accessible to ordinary people, at the very same time that it starts from a science fiction premise.

When archaeologists complain about the media, someone always points out that TV shows and movies bear little or no resemblance to the lives that archaeologists actually lead. There is no toothbrushing of pottery or writing of excavation reports, no grant applications or tenure reviews. This dissonance makes it easy to dismiss popular treatments of archaeology as “wrong”. But that is only true if we make the mistake of thinking that anyone outside the archaeology really cares about the sufferings of academics. I don’t mean to be rude here, but archaeologists have an outsize sense of entitlement. We feel that our long years in graduate school, the months spent digging in the sun, and the boredom of data analysis gives us the sole right to talk about history. But the past has always belonged to everyone, and the public comes to the topic with a very different set of interests. They don’t have to listen to us: if the academy won’t give them what they’re looking for, they can turn on Ancient Discoveries instead.

Grab the Ring

Let me be blunt: archaeologists should be humble and grateful for the opportunity that the mass media is offering them. No one looks to the HR manager, dental technician, or real estate developer to save the world. But they invite the archaeologist to assume heroic powers as a defender of humanity, a shamanic worker in the collective unconscious.

Those of us who realize what we’re being offered are, I think, uncomfortable with this role, because it is so far from our own self-image as scholars and scientists. This is why the hosts of archaeology-themed TV shows are always “survivalists”, “adventurers”, or practitioners of extreme sports. These men make their living by guiding people through liminal experiences. But they’re actors, and don’t know much about the past. Watching Cities of the Underworld, I feel sorry for Don Wildman: in the midst of some ancient labyrinth, surrounded by skulls and darkness, he is often at a total loss for words. By the same token, those who have lots to say, but little knowledge, can have outsize success: Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, for instance, reached tens of millions of people with an exciting vision of the past. His clever pastiche of pseudo-historical tidbits was inaccurate and unoriginal, but nonetheless transformed popular ideas about Jesus and the Bible for tens of millions of readers. In these situations, the absence of archaeologists’ voices has consequences that marginalize academic and scientific truths.

The past belongs to everyone, and the public deserves strong, capable, creative guides who will lead them into another world and then bring them back safe. Hollywood is right: in the popular understanding, that is what archaeologists are for. Archaeology should unleash chaos into the public imagination. If they want to have influence in mass culture, archaeologists need to be storytellers, mythmakers, science fiction writers. And I don’t mean just as a hobby, or an occasional thing. Writing a bestselling thriller based on archaeological data should be should be celebrated at conferences, and help you get tenure. Storytelling should be part of graduate training for archaeologists. It should be as highly respected, and vigorously debated, as any study of temple façades or agricultural innovation. It should be integral to the discipline.

It is popular to ridicule Zahi Hawass’ flamboyant self-promotion and Indiana Jones affectations. But he has the right idea. He understands the public role that is expected of him and uses it to promote a political and cultural agenda. He gives the people what they want, while insisting on the importance of scientific archaeology. If we criticize him, it should be on how well his public persona advances our collective goals of scholarship and site preservation – not for stooping to speak to the masses in a language they understand and crave.

The challenge is to use our power confidently, and accept our role as guides to the outer limits of what it means to be human. We know that the real stories of the human past are much better than crystal skulls, or Jet Li’s turn as a magical undead kung fu emperor. Archaeologists have the knowledge, the authority, and the imagination to make amazing popular works that are just as epic (or more so) than another lame Mummy sequel.

To make this happen, the academy has to redefine how they train, hire, and reward archaeologists. Graduate students should take classes that take popular culture seriously, that teach them to talk to the public, and that encourage them to tell the stories that got them fascinated with archaeology in the first place. Professors need to consume popular media and write articles for popular magazines. Department chairs and deans need to make sure their programs teach archaeology in the media, public interpretation, and science fiction writing as integral and required parts of the curriculum – and criteria for tenure and promotion.

People want their myths, and look to archaeologists to provide them. If we refuse the privilege we are offered, then we richly deserve the third-rate visions of archaeology that the media creates to fill the void.

Dan Shoup also blogs regularly at archaeopop.blogspot.com

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.

Violence is always the site of contest (of bodies, things, discourse) and part of that contest inevitably concerns what does and doesn’t constitute violence. Violence, in evoking intense anxiety is also something that provokes polarizing responses: either (and sometimes both) valorization or condemnation. Both responses, however, are deeply involved in issues of visibility – to claim that, for instance, war is glorious and therefore not really violence, or that it is hideous but exceptional are both mechanisms for distancing, bracketing off or making invisible. Violence is an issue with a built in cloaking device, deflecting and bending light around it. Even attempts to define (or condemn) violence without respect to a situated position frequently go astray at the diversion physical violence offers those in a position to write less visible but no less damaging structural or symbolic violences into the game.

Today’s official discourse, situated in a particular global structure of power and historical genealogy, focuses on intent and physical violence. Alternative, more inclusive and radical understandings, however, have begun focusing on effects and the causes of suffering whether the results of hostility, indifference or even good-will. A corollary of a focus on effects is the necessity of a broadened notion of violence – one that intertwines symbolic and structural with physical violence. In structuring exposure to suffering and providing the logics of inequality in hierarchies of worth, structural and symbolic violence respectively give acts of physical violence their contexts. Divorced from its moral economy and structures of inequality, physical violence, such as killing or torture, becomes unintelligible or at best reduced to mechanistic biological urges or functionalist instrumentalism. Symbolic violence, in constructing some individuals as “life not worth living”, supplies both overt and covert practices of violence with their victims even as structures of inequality both shape and are shaped by discourses of worth and entitlement while providing a normalized form for the distribution of suffering (including physical violence).

As such, an archaeology of violence cannot be merely an archaeology of skeletal trauma, weapons, fortifications, sacrificial victims or mass graves. None of these things can be made sense of without reference to the relational entanglements of discursive as well as physical bodies, in practices and meanings that were embodied but are not reducible to their material traces. Physical violence with its seductive materiality is but the superficial eruption of vast subterranean networks of existential hierarchy and moral meaning. Through its moral economies and implicated inequalities of being, physical violence is not only made sense of through reference to, but also constitutive of, historical constitutions of “the human” and of “civilization”. The danger of defining and objectifying violence in order to find it in the ground then, is the danger of foreclosing investigation of its most important aspect: the paradoxical immateriality of violence.

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.

In contrast to the preceding chapters, Witmore’s chapter 9 articulates an alternative view on both the social and on time in archaeological contexts, while still arguing for complexity. He emphasizes interactions and material relationships in Greece over perception and preexisting social structures, such that he does not privilege the social construction of landscape and meaning. Conversely, Matthews and Palus argue in chapter 10 that the landed elite in Annapolis purposefully manipulated sight lines in a period of rapid urban redefinition. Finally, Hauser and Hicks (chapter 11) explore discrepant experiences of landscape while trying to ground such experiences in the materiality of the land.

All of these studies, though from many and varied locations in the world, argue against simplicity on the grounds that ‘landscapes’ are not endowed with universally understood meanings, but are products of particular social and temporal constructions (with the exception of Witmore, who does not see landscapes as products of other structures). In other words, these chapters attribute the meaning of different landscapes to the prevailing and competing social conditions of different time periods, while recognizing that no time period is characterized by a single, uniform, social group. This is presented in several ways, ranging from those that emphasize perception and historically situated social groups to an approach that regards landscapes as integrating a complex array of different pasts, influencing as much as they are influenced (i.e. Witmore).

Yet, while the individual chapters are independently engaging, the compilation of chapters seems to lack a cohesiveness that is consistent with the message presented in the introductory chapter. Two prevailing themes emerge from the introduction: diversity and situatedness. Following scholars such as Barbara Bender, diversity is seen in the difficulty of formulating a coherent definition of landscapes. This is, in fact, the justification for a book about diverse methodologies in diverse places (the mandate of a WAC volume). Furthermore, they argue that the diversity of case studies shows that different places and temporalities require “stand points,” or highly specific sets of situated practices that recognize the social, historical and political currents of a given time. This is certainly a popular sentiment in archaeology today, but it is one that does not do justice to the entirety of practices around landscape that currently exist (or even what is included in the book). This ranges from non-traditional forms of engagement with ‘landscapes’ to studies that conceive of stand points in different ways than outlined by the editors. Indeed, the incorporation of new media (certainly sound is involved in how landscapes are perceived as acoustic/auditory archaeology suggests (e.g. Mills 2005)), art, and material studies would help to bolster the claim that landscape studies truly are diverse in scope and methodology.

Ultimately the introduction argues for the book’s layout in an unsatisfying way: landscape defies definition; because it cannot be defined singularly, it is appropriately regarded as diverse; this diversity is attributed to different social perspectives; the social perspective, then, becomes the “stand point”; stand points create landscape(s). The problem here is that the argument assumes from the onset that the ‘social’ drives meaning, subjecting the physical environment to the whim of human imagination rather than inserting it as a key component in the determination of what landscapes are. Landscapes are not diverse if they are only social; what are diverse are the social perspectives (on the problem with the ‘social’ see Latour (2005); in archaeology see Webmoor and Witmore (2008)). Landscapes are not, for instance, severed from past actions in favor of entirely new historically situated social groups. Instead, landscapes bring past actions together in interactions with people and other things, with the situatedness of a group being the outcome rather than the determinant of meaning formation.

Finally, the emphasis on methodology and location-specific practices has resulted in a book about a topic that never fully gets defined. While the introduction aptly suggests that ‘landscape’ defies a unitary explanation, the subsequent chapters sometimes appear to take for granted what landscapes are. Landscape eludes case-specific definitions because landscapes are what people make of them – a vague definition that borders too much on the idea that landscapes are anything and everything (with some notable exceptions). An exploration of how different scholars have approached the ‘notion’ of landscape in more current ways would have been a useful exercise and would have bound a volume of this nature together more concretely. Landscape is clearly a compelling topic that offers each of the authors in this book a strong basis for understanding their particular regions. Still, opening up landscape archaeology to complexity should entail some engagement with what those complexities are for the very notion of a landscape. Failing that, this compilation reads as a showcase for archaeologies of landscape in different locations without due consideration for what this means to the discipline as a whole.

By way of conclusion, it is worth reiterating that the volume contains many good chapters that engage with interesting cases. The book’s primary shortcoming is with the organization of these chapters, as it leaves the reader without a clear sense of what strain actually holds the volume together.

References
Alcock, S. E. and Cherry, J. F. (eds.) 2004. Side-By-Side Survey: Comparative Regional Studies in the Mediterranean World. Oxford: Oxbow.

Ashmore, W. and Knapp, A. B. (eds.) 1999. Archaeologies of Landscape: Contemporary Perspectives. Malden MA; Oxford: Blackwell.

Bender, B. (ed.) 1993. Landscape: Politics and Perspectives. Providence: Berg.

Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

Mills, S. 2005. Sensing the place: sounds and landscape archaeology. In D. Bailey, A. Whittle and V. Cummings (eds.), Unsettling the Neolithic, 79-89. Oxford: Oxbow.

Ooghe, B. and Verhoeven, G. (eds.) 2007. Broadening Horizons: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Landscape Study. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press.

Webmoor, T. and Witmore, C. 2008. Things are us! A commentary on human/things relations under the banner of a ‘social’ archaeology. Norwegian Archaeological Review 41(1): 53-70.

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).

Yet despite its shortcomings, Starn’ s analysis did catalyze ongoing discussions among social anthropologists and ethnohistorians about how to explain and depict the simultaneous continuity and transformation of Andean societies in time. As a result of these conversations, recent ethnographic research in the Andes has been much more attuned to the political valences of indigenous cultural practice, to the ways in which rural economies are indelibly bound to global markets, etc. – in essence, to the modernity of Andean indigenous people.

For prehistoric archaeologists working in the region, however, the relationship between structure and history remains a central interpretive and political concern. As in so many regional traditions of scholarship, analogies between conditions described in ethnographic and ethnohistoric research and the prehistoric past form the backbone of Andean archaeological interpretation (Wylie 1985). And despite becoming more careful about the ways in which we construct such analogies, Andean archaeologists are still frequently accused of uncritically projecting ethnographic models into the deep past – particularly “uniquely Andean” patterns identified in the work of the late John Murra and his students (e.g., ayllu-based social organization, the absence of markets, “vertical archipelago” exchange, the importance of cloth above other materials) (W. Isbell 1997, Goldstein 2005, VanChiVard 2007).

One of the many ways in which Denise Arnold and Christine Hastorf’s new book Heads of State (Left Coast Press, 2008) can be read is as a novel intervention in the complex methodological interface where Andean archaeology meets ethnography and ethnohistory. To my knowledge, Heads is the first major monograph on an Andean topic to be co-written by an ethnographer and an archaeologist. As such, its implications extend beyond the more specific topic the book seeks to address ¬(the practice of head taking and the meanings of heads in the Andes from the Formative period to contemporary times).

Much of Arnold’s previous work has focused on the intersections between weaving, gender, violence, memory and textuality in the ayllu of Qaqachaka, a highland Aymara-speaking group living on the border between the departments of Oruro and Potosí, in Bolivia. Hastorf’s scholarship has ranged from explorations of ancient diet and agriculture in the central Peruvian highlands, to Formative Period archaeology (1500BCE to 400CE ) in the Lake Titicaca region. Accordingly, case material in the volume gravitates towards these various geographic poles of attraction. Readers familiar with the authors’ previous publications will recognize elements of Heads that draw on Arnold’s co-authored work with Juan de Dios Yapita on contemporary and historical head taking in the Qaqachaka region (Arnold and Yapita 2006) and a recent article by Hastorf (2003) on ancestor veneration at the Middle Formative site of Chiripa, Bolivia. However, several new topics are treated (e.g., the meaning of heads in Chavín, Paracas Nazca, Moche, and Inka contexts, as well as among Amazonian groups), such that the volume’s coverage is truly sweeping.

The overarching argument of Heads is that head taking in the Andes, and its iconographic representation, are and have always been consummately political practices – not simply ritual mumbo-jumbo. In the authors’ view, the potent meanings of heads among Andean and Amazonian peoples (as the seat of some “seed-like” quality, or the soul, or a kind of mana or hau [or ch’ama] that could be captured and accumulated) led head taking to be a generative political practice in Andean history, entangled in the development of institutions as diverse as bureaucratic record-keeping, market exchange, and textile arts.

The volume is divided into two parts – the first primarily ethnographic, the second mostly archaeological. Topically, the bulk of its pages are devoted to describing the elaborate and diverse practices that center on heads in contemporary Andean settings. Archaeological material is concentrated in Chapter 6 “Heads and Andean Political Change from an Archaeological Perspective” and Chapter 7 “Central Andean Political Developments.” However, the authors also frequently insert archaeological examples into earlier chapters to reinforce arguments constructed primarily in reference to ethnographic material.

But rather than focusing on marshalling their evidence to simply prove that Head Taking = Politics, Arnold and Hastorf explore specific ways in which the practice operates in political context. They favor a spectral approach to ethnographic analysis, refracting contemporary examples of head symbolism and head taking through diverse theoretical perspectives instead of presenting a single concise description. At the same time, the presentation of ethnographic material downplays historical change and geographic diversity, suggesting a general and consistently “Andean” way of understanding heads and head taking.

The volume’s spectrum of approaches are concisely presented in the “nine axes of current and future research” outlined in the concluding chapter (p. 217-233). The authors suggestion that, in the Andes, both in the past and the present:

1) Heads are symbols of political power, and an individual’s acquisition of enemy heads is a major pathway to authority.

2) Heads are thought to contain the power of (re)generation – effective in human reproduction and agricultural fertility.

3) Head-taking practices articulate gendered forms of authority: masculine power is associated with head taking and feminine power is associated with the curation of captured heads.

4) Heads reference speech, and this connection with the spoken word is one of the reasons that head taking later evolved into Andean knotted string recordkeeping (khipu). In the authors’ own words, “head taking and the related cultural development of using the pendant hair to form early versions of the knotted threads, called kipu in Quechua or chinu in Aymara, might be at the heart of early developments in bureaucratic accounting systems associated with early political formations” (47).

5) Heads, like other body parts, implicitly reference a whole and (especially when they are perceived as belonging to ancestors), thus serve as effective metaphors in the constitution of group identity.

6) Heads are politically important both in “centrifugal” (expansive) polities, where they are captured from enemies, and “centripetal” (inward-looking) societies, where they are more important as references to ancestors and genealogical lines. However, in expansive polities, enemy heads are often ritually converted into ancestors.

7) Practices centered on head taking and curation express and construct social identity and difference.

8) Heads were sought out in a spirit much like that of Marxian “primitive accumulation” and their circulation may have “triggered the initial stage of a differentiated economic domain, with certain elements in common to an incipient form of capitalism” (p. 231).

9) The guarding and maintenance of heads concentrates their potential and historically connects them more tightly to bureaucratic management and the origins of complex recordkeeping

In short, there is no lack of novel ideas presented in Heads of State. The ethnographic chapters present intriguing historical and contemporary examples of head taking, as well as a wealth of provocative suggestions about its meaning and political efficacy. The archaeological chapters offer an excellent synthesis of previous scholarship on head taking in the prehistoric Andes, as well as ample evidence for its longstanding political character – e.g., the association of caches of heads with large monuments, the depiction of head taking in larger battle scenes.

In many ways, the connection between the ethnographic and archaeological material in the volume is a loose one. Because the authors’ ethnographic description of head taking is so multi-faceted, it serves less as a baseline for writing a whole history of the practice and more as source of inspiration for the interpretation of isolated archaeological examples. For example, the association between severed heads and plants in Nazca (0-500 CE , southern Peruvian coast) iconography recalls the contemporary understanding of heads as possessing regenerative potential. Or the caching of heads in D-shaped buildings in Wari (500-900 CE, central Peruvian Andes) may be an indication of a sort of primitive accumulation. These are all clearly presented, well-argued points.

But it may be going too far to proffer that head taking was the essential “origin point” of the full range of institutions the authors attribute to it: that “the Andean notion of jucha in the sense of obligation, duty, or debt derives from the original sucking of the brains out of skulls in warfare” (225); that “…the origins of weaving may have derived from creating in the loom space the cultural medium for appropriating the energies of the trophy head of a dead enemy, and reintegrating its spirit into the [sic.] own group” (227); that “…the generating yield obtained from [the] statewide scale of head taking and head management might even have triggered the initial stage of a differentiated economic domain, with certain elements in common to an incipient form of capitalism” (231). These seem too many phenomena, too grand, and too pervasive to be explained without reference to other generative political practices – not to mention other cultural preoccupations, physical needs, or elements of political economy.

After reading Heads, it is difficult to deny the important place of head symbolism and head taking in a diverse range of political contexts in Andean history. But I am also reminded of Ann Stahl’s (1993) message about the importance of using ethnographic and historical analogies to interpret archaeological remains in ways that allow us to explore differences between them, not just similarities. When and where did Andean peoples not participate in the cult of heads, or of its direct historical derivatives? Why did head taking or head curation gain particular importance in some Andean contexts but not in others, and how did these practices articulate with other, contemporary symbolic regimes? While Orin Starn’s nearly twenty-year-old devaluation of historical continuity in Andean societies seems hasty in retrospect, it helps remind us of the essential need to seek out discontinuities between past and present in order to make mutual sense of them. So while Heads points us in many interesting directions, it may be necessary to return to the beginning to find our way there.

Bibliography

Arnold, Denise Y. and Christine A. Hastorf. 2008. Heads of State: Icons, Power, and Politics in the Ancient and Modern Andes. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Arnold, Denise Y. and Juan de Dios Yapita. 2006. The Metamorphosis of Heads: Textual Struggles, Education and Land in the Andes. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, Illuminations Series.

Goldstein, Paul. 2005. Andean Diaspora: The Tiwanaku Colonies and the Origins of South American Empire. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press.

Harris, Olivia. 2000. To Make the Earth Bear Fruit. London: Institute of Latin American Studies.

Hastorf, Christine A. 2003. “Community with the Ancestors: Ceremonies and Social Memory in the Middle Formative at Chiripa, Bolivia.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 22(4): 305-322.

Isbell, Billie Jean. 1978. To Defend Ourselves: Ecology and Ritual in an Andean Village.
Austin: University of Texas Press.

Isbell, William. 1997. Mummies and Mortuary Monuments: A Postprocessual Prehistory of Central Andean Social Organization. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Stahl, Ann B. 1993. “Concepts of Time and Approaches to Analogical Reasoning in
Historical Perspective.” American Antiquity 58(2): 235-260.

Starn, Orin. 1991. “Missing the Revolution: Anthropologists and the War in Peru.”
Cultural Anthropology 6(1): 63-91.

Vanderbilt-Chicago-Harvard Workshop in Andean Studies. March 30-31, 2007. Nashville, TN.

Wylie, Alison. 1985. “The Reaction Against Analogy,” in Schiffer, Michael B., ed.,
Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory. New York: Academic Press. 63-111.

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 . . .

Indeed, I wish I had been present at the ‘pissing on Bourdieu’s book’/burying of the excavator’s trowel incident (273-274). Now that doesn’t happen often! Or does it? This is another major point of the book. The “background noise” (281) or the “back regions” (298) edited out of traditional reports for being superfluous and irrelevant to the project’s findings are, in fact, integral to its operation from the ground up. A reflexive acknowledgement in anthropological and archaeological fieldwork that being human, caught up in fields of relations while ‘in the field’, cannot and should not be bracketed off from being a ‘scientist’. This is the book’s ‘sociology of the discipline’ thesis: archaeology is a social practice in the present that makes it impossible to sieve out subjectivity from archaeological interpretations. Steeped in postprocessual and interpretive archaeology, the book holds true to the ‘principle of honesty’. It is well taken, and the authors do a good job of opening up the process of how consensus in interpretation is reached by presenting discussions and diary entries where alternate views are expressed. The discussion with the geomorphologists (Chapter 9) was the best example of this.

As a corollary to this social activity thesis, in Chapter 11 the book expands upon the experience of fieldwork as initiation into craft, of apprenticeship. Archaeology is a field of relations that bind participants together as a seasonal community undergoing Van Gennepian rites of passage. While most archaeologists are highly aware of these initiatory rites, and are often drawn to doing fieldwork because of the comradeship, no other book has treated it with such serious attention.

But the book attempts to do too much with too much ‘data’. Presenting these ‘back stories’ as well as the ‘front stories’ of survey and excavation, contributes to the continued inundation of the reader with repetition and innocuous details – exactly what is intervisible and from which stone? who’s trowel had more rust? why were Danner boots better than steel Doc Martins? just what did that post-it comment from the Altarnun exhibition say?

A postmodern paralysis. Rather than sieving all potential information through experts’ experience and judgment, we have the opposite. Document it all as anything may be relevant. This forensic ‘thesis’ relates to the ‘crisis of representation’ and the claim that all statements about the past are subjective interpretations. Since statements cannot be definitively adjudicated based upon accepted criteria, and so cannot be objectively ‘true’, the emphasis shifts to a ‘shotgun effect’ approach. Put enough (multiple) interpretations out there so that amongst them all we are sure to hit upon something important. As seasoned scholars, this manic desire to document, as well as the “concern with the manner in which the past is written and presented” (27, emphasis original) is not simply experimentation for the sake of satisfying rebellious impulses and postmodern anxiety. It is backed-up by a body of theory that spans the social sciences. Yet only this exact combination – established scholars, theoretical depth and experimentation – legitimizes the book’s excesses. Indeed, I suspect if any of these three ingredients were absent, the book would not have worked – literally, as I doubt very much that an established press would have published it.

Wedded to eschewing any general criteria for obtaining objectivity, opting to (over)document the rich and subjective experience of doing archaeology in the present, is another inter-related thesis. A theory of ontology, of Being-in-the-world: making places makes people. With two of the three project directors coming from Material Culture Studies at University College London, we are given the group’s dictum of dialects over and over again. A statistical study could be done to present how often the phrases ‘mutual engagement’, ‘a dialectical relationship’, ‘in making things we make ourselves’, and so forth crop up with mantra-like consistency. The corollary is that since being is embodied, to understand this dialectical process of mutual engagement we need to attend to the sensuous and physical. This again sets themselves the most difficult task of overcoming problems of their own making, as “neither word nor image can be substituted for being bodily in place” (339). The attempt in the book is very admirable. And more than most other scholars in archaeology the authors have pushed the theoretical and methodological limits of evoking place with text. But with setting themselves such a lofty goal, how can the book succeed, then?

Despite the explicit attempt to “create a dialogic relationship between images and words” (335), they doom themselves to failure because of the fundamental assumption that textual communication of experience is fundamental to visual forms of expression: “photographs are typically invaded by language from the very moment we start to look at them” (335). Images are inadequate by themselves as “they remain radically underdetermined as to be incapable of constituting a narrative form” (335). This allegiance to constructing narratives, of the importance of rendering the fieldwork of Leskernick in text, runs contrary to their other primary thesis: that conventional archaeological narratives inadequately convey the messiness, subjectivity and sensuous qualities of working at archaeology. The book’s priority of text over the visual ought to be questioned. The visual would seem to be more capable of evoking, with less ‘philosophical-linguistic closure’, the experience of Leskernick. I am surprised that there were not more experiments in video documentation and diaries. And while an analysis of the website is outside this review, the project would have certainly benefited from integrating new media into the project from the outset.

In the end, “we are left with more questions than we started out with” (412). This, both as a reader and as an archaeologist, disappoints me. There may have been rhetorical force behind such a pithy postmodern conclusion. Say in the mid-1990s while the project was conducted. Since this time such statements have become tiresome, part of reflexivity’s redux. We cannot abdicate our anthropological and archaeological authority. We are specialists, trained in a particular practice. We have expertise and so should be able to say something a bit more definitive than this. Indeed, this is borne out of the book’s sociological analyses (Chapters 11-12). While well intentioned and despite efforts at implementing “an egalitarian and nonhierarchical vision of fieldwork organization” (249), flat hierarchies are flawed. Competence, background knowledge and experience, and interests vary amongst practitioners. We tend to sort ourselves out. “We’re trapped in the hierarchy of knowledge: however much we try to democratize . . . there is an inequality” (250). Steeped in Leskernick for five field seasons, I think the authors should proffer expert opinion.

Had it been published just after the conclusion of the project in 1999, the book would have been groundbreaking. Both in terms of representational form and as a capstone to the content of the theses concerning social practice, reflexivity, dialectical relationships with material culture, and even archaeological art. Now, the theses have become too repetitious, almost like mantras, and the experimentations in textual representation limited by the medium. While admirably drawing attention to the political economy of doing archaeology at the academy and in the field, an equally uncompromising look at the economy driving publication – where the (textual) wheels meet the road, so to speak - of archaeological work would have aided in explaining the (apparent) delay of the book and pushed the book’s arguments for reflexive attention to the process of fieldwork even further - to the future of analog publication in a 'digital millennium'. In 2008, that would have been radical. But then, how long would that book have to be?

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

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.

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).

Yet, I would suggest that it is neither the size of the piles that are destined for the local incinerator, and here I am reminded of that final scene at the end of Citizen Cane where we finally learn what is rosebud as the sled is engulfed in the flames, or the emotional wreckage that attaches to these perfectly good things which is most shocking. Rather, in this climate of fear, it is the thought of dispossession, that middle-class America might be forced to severe its ties to the very material culture that so defines this particular identification. When the dumpsters of colleges and universities fill-up in the seasonal ritual of dorm-room clearance, we hardly bat an eye. This particular “trashing out” can be dismissed and even condoned as part of the ritual preparations for a new life-stage. Similarly, when such foreclosures happen to the storage units and their contents become auctioned off to the highest bidder, the emotional outpourings are minimal. Here, the site of destruction is not the home, but a liminal space, a staging ground where material culture becomes dislocated from its domestic context to fulfill new chapters in the biographical social life of things – be it trash, thrift shop, recycling or, for the lucky, art.

II. Trashing in: Archaeological opportunity or heritage responsibility

Is there a role for archaeology in what is happening? Reyes has referred above to the process of trashing out as an excavation. The process itself is far from an effort at salvage, although it is ripe for metaphorical play with mortgage holders and even whole communities as “underwater.” One possibility is to suggest that garbage archaeology no longer needs to happen exclusively at the landfill, and some have already begun to take steps in that direction with an archaeology of the contemporary past. There is now an opportunity to bring those skills to the suburbs where the trash stream intersects in catastrophic ways with a domestic sphere that has ceased to function. This might take the form of an ethno-archaeological project that examines the very process of abandonment and the site formation principles that would be applicable in the past. Such research might have potential applicability to the world’s largest archaeological site, the ruin field of early Islamic period Samarra, capital of the Abbasid caliphate during much of the 9th century CE and perhaps one of the medieval world’s biggest speculative real-estate bubbles. More recently it has been doubly abandoned given the present inability of the state or the occupation forces to protect the site from deliberate destruction by looters and the construction of military bases.

This raises an issue different from whether these foreclosed homes are an archaeological opportunity, but whether archaeologists have assumed the responsibility to preserve something of what is happening here, as sites in the making. The opportunities and responsibilities may not be mutually exclusive of course as the archaeological recording may serve as the form by which we document the material transformation of an American landscape and the consumer culture that has driven it, particularly in the post-war period. But should we go beyond the recording and actually preserve these sites intact, in their entirety, the way we might other historic buildings? Or is preservation more exclusively the domain of our achievements as a nation and not our failures? A related question is to consider what we might do to preserve such a moment as the foreclosed home in its state of readiness for the “trash out.” At a certain level such ruination defies the attempt to freeze the very taphonomic processes that, in this case, might most interest the archaeologists. Is that moment of abandonment just too fleeting to capture in the ways that allow us to archive it in perpetuity? Archaeologist Shannon Dawdy in her recent keynote address at TAG-NYC (May 2008) raised a similar concern about the ruins of New Orleans post-Katrina.

III. Left behind: Archaeology and abandonment

In choosing to follow the trail of the material culture left behind, archaeology runs the risk of forgetting the continuity of the lives that have severed their connections with things that have now become relegated to a past, perhaps the past. These acts of abandonment may signify a certain kind of social death, but they may too readily be confused with death itself. My point is not to argue that we must simultaneously chase after those who have chosen or who have been forced to move on. In fact there might be something redemptive in not pursuing that path. It opens the space for a hopeful commentary in which to imagine that we can cultivate new sets of relations with the material worlds that we inhabit, relationships that might not end in such destructive outcomes. Not knowing where those agents of abandonment go next allows for readings of this new American (U.S.) potlatch as a liberating gesture, one that might cause us to pause about our own dismay at perfectly good things instantaneously reclassified as trash. Accumulation and abandonment are at the core of the archaeological record, yet our ability to reflect on the ways in which we value these two modes of engagement with our things is severely compromised. Perhaps it is time to get over our horror over what is left behind and rethink our, often implicit, some times explicit, valorization of that which is acquired.

References

Reyes, P. 2008: “Bleak Houses: Digging through the ruins of the mortgage crisis.” Harper’s October 2008 (31-45)