here is our site

helloooo everyone. i think that we should use this as a sketch pad to throw down our ideas as they emerge....comments....criticisms.....suggestions.....

here's a start (from the beginning) --

16/02/05

DWB: there is a good chance that i will have a full-time replacement to cover my teaching and admin (minus the HoD biz) next year in cardiff and i want to write at least one big thing. you and i have spoken in the past about a book on the rhetoric of archaeology and how we are committed to pushing archaeology beyond explanation. i was talking to mike p about this....here's my idea. the three of us write a book.

DWB: with you and mike's help, i write the one bit which will be about the classic texts in archaeology (those that were rhetorically successful in their time and place) with some discussion of how some have tried to push the debate forward (e.g., your experiencing the past book and the articles in the camb conf book). mike p will write about 30,000 words on performance and how that works -- lots of examples; i will write 30,000 words on 'art' and visual culture and how that works; and you would write 30,000 words on design (or similar) as a way of thinking around objects, people, activities, etc. the whole sense will be to convince by showing as opposed to telling... timetable: to be finished by june 2006 perhaps with a get together here or there to have a couple of thrash outs....

...waddya think?

what are the 'classic' archaeological texts? don't think that we need to limit this to monographs, nor does it even have to be limited to traditional printed text....documentaries, film, cartoons...anything goes in the end, though it may be more managable to start with written and published texts that were intended for the academic audience...could look at a much larger range of output/media later on. i just wanted to get an idea of what people had originally found to be convincing. an example, as MS has noted, is renfrew's Emergence of Civilisation and the use of flow-charts in the system theory bit.

the mechanics of convincing: the flow charts; the use of analogy (ethnographic, modern historical, experimental)....indeed the whole new archaeology stress on using evidence to prove...photography (and the authority of the photograph), the line-drawing, the Harris Matrix and the Munsell colour chart -- and there are a whole range of empiricist guages and calipers to measure things (see in any text on ceramics study)...indeed the mechanics of measuring; headings and sub-headings; references to non-local authorities (location taken to be either a geographic/linguistic entity -- france, bulgaria, etc -- or a philosophical one -- structuralism, critical theory)

...then there must also be an anti-mechanics of convincing -- or is it the mechanics of anti-convincing -- (i.e., the purposeful flauting of the rules, the shock value of the unexpected as well as the frightening and unbalancing -- the abject and similar)...the latter are the types of things that i want to explore in terms of visual culture and its potential to convince

MS: what a neat idea! I have a bunch of things and workings that can be quickly turned round for this and we can treat it as an informal exercise - as opposed to an over-researched treatise. how ambitious do you want to be with a publisher? this will govern how we treat the topic of course. I think we may be able to push it as a transdisciplinary work on manifesting the past - so aim for a cultural studies list/CRM/heritage/performance studies/anthropology/archaeology Berg? There are a couple of new series starting in the US. Ask Mike who is taking over from Routledge's performance list

MS: as prep and to sharpen up the project i can set up a collaborative site - so we can simultaneously edit ideas without the hassle of email and different versions

17/02/05

DWB: great on the bailey-shanks-pearson rhetoric project....on the topic of publication venue, why not plan a series of outputs, perhaps at least one each in each of our own personal spheres of activity. my original plan (which remains) is to a routledge book (though berg is a possibility) but i don't see why we can't also do other things....i especially like the idea of trying to do a lot of this on a co-authoring-esque site and then, not only producing something through web-media, but also using the record of our work on the project (book and otherwise) as a further element of output -- sort of a pathology of a book....then of course another output could be via performance....

so...will you get this site-thing up and running NOW and then it can be a record of what we are doing...and a common stimulus