"The Perfume of Garbage: Archaeology and Modernity," jointly authored with archaeologists Michael Shanks and Bill Rathje, appeared in the academic journal Modernism/ modernity. This article—mainly a meditation on connections between archaeology, modernity, and the material world around us—contains some of my recent work on ruins, and hints as to where I'm taking the WLS project in the future.

As one of the authors, I am entitled to post it on the web, so here it is.

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Even the images that do not explicitly participate in the Romantic imagery of ivy clad collapsing ruins have some things in common with them.

1. Frailty of human achievement and the force of nature. Most of the images—whether we are looking the ruin of Washington in Logan's Run, scenes of industrial decay from Manhattan, or the disintegrating Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco—in some way contrast the frailty of human achievement and the immensity and inevitability of nature's triumph. Possible exceptions to are those representations of the blasted city in which humanity is directly responsible for the devastation.
2. Problematised meanings. The value or significance of a previous age's artefacts is not automatically understood; it is slippery and subject to misinterpretation.
3. Thirdly, I want to draw in the idea of the sublime. Radisch suggests the two paintings by Robert as examples of sublimity. When shown originally, they would have been placed next to each other, allowing the viewer to see the planned gallery in the near future and in the far future. The shock of seeing the two so juxtaposed presents the viewer with of a moment of sublime awareness, awareness of the great scale of history in comparison with the works of man, and a sense of horror at their ephemeral nature.
4. Notions of temporality. I'll expand on this a little later but, for now, take a look at some Ghost Stories and the "Perfume of Garbage" (above).

The most dramatic example of the sublime in twentieth Century SF is the denouement of Planet of the Apes, in which Taylor is confronted with the fate of the society from which he came - but arguably, all of the examples discussed rely on this to a greater or lesser extent. Logan's Run presents us with a highly futuristic society in which the protagonists are blissfully unaware of the time before and what it is like to be 'old'. The White Mountain begins in such a way as to make us believe that we are seeing England in the eighteenth Century, before the shock of the first appearance of an alien tripod. Even the images of the modern city/ building in decay present us with an appreciation of their fragile, ephemeral character versus the inevitable advance of natural forces.