As a reassessment of knowledge construction in archaeology, my dissertation project builds upon the innovative tradition regional survey in the Aegean where archaeological materials and historical traces are utilized as a basis for addressing long-term change on a landscape scale. This project compliments recent attempts to put theory into practice by the interpretive school of fieldwork in archaeology, as with Ian Hodder’s and Ruth Tringham's excavations at Çatalhöyük in Turkey by shifting the emphasis away from epistemology, which does not match up to the complexities of what archaeologies do in real-time. Furthermore, it is argued that in the exclusive embrace of meaning (the process of making sense) by interpretive approaches we distance ourselves too far from the material world. Instead, I lay out (following Olsen 2003) a symmetrical archaeology where in bypassing the contradictory oppositions of Modernist thought (subject/object, mind/body, culture/nature) meaning is reconfigured within collectives of humans, materials, and media through the integration of new (i.e. digital) technologies as modes of articulating landscape and the material past. In addition, the dissertation explores forms of reiterative practice, thereby developing a sound methodology for revisiting archaeological archives and material contexts in order to rework materials from previous archaeological projects. To this end, I build upon the Argolid Exploration Project (AEP), which was conducted in a small region of southern Greece by an interdisciplinary collaborative group under the direction of Professor Michael Jameson, an Ancient Historian of the Department of Classics at Stanford University, during the 1970’s and 80’s. The broader significance of the dissertation lies in its generation of new archaeological practices that are driven by more than textual inscription.

Multiple fields and archaeological practice Home