Reclaiming Archaeology: Beyond the Tropes of Modernity (Archaeological Orientations)

Archaeology has been an important source of metaphors for some of the key intellectuals of the 20 th century: Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Alois Riegl and Michel Foucault, amongst many others. However, this power has also turned against archaeology, because the discipline has been dealt with perfunctorily as a mere provider of metaphors that other intellectuals have exploited. Scholars from different fields continue to explore areas in which archaeologists have been working for over two centuries, with little or no reference to the discipline. It seems that excavation, stratigraphy or ruins only become important at a trans-disciplinary level when people from outside archaeology pay attention to them and somehow dematerialize them. Meanwhile, archaeologists have been usually more interested in borrowing theories from other fields, rather than in developing the theoretical potential of the same concepts that other thinkers find so useful. The time is ripe for archaeologists to address a wider audience and engage in theoretical debates from a position of equality, not of subalternity. Reclaiming Archaeology explores how archaeology can be useful to rethink modernity’s big issues, and more specifically late modernity (broadly understood as the 20 th and 21 st centuries). The book contains a series of original essays, not necessarily following the conventional academic rules of archaeological writing or thinking, allowing rhetoric to have its place in disclosing the archaeological. In each of the four sections that constitute this book (method, time, heritage and materiality), the contributors deal with different archaeological tropes, such as excavation, surface/depth, genealogy, ruins, fragments, repressed memories and traces. They criticize their modernist implications and rework them in creative ways, in order to show the power of archaeology not just to understand the past, but also the present. Reclaiming Archaeology includes essays from a diverse array of archaeologists who have dealt in one way or another with modernity, including scholars from non-Anglophone countries who have approached the issue in original ways during recent years, as well as contributors from other fields who engage in a creative dialogue with archaeology and the work of archaeologists. Archaeology has been an important source of metaphors for some of the key intellectuals of the 20^th^ century: Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Alois Riegl and Michel Foucault, amongst many others. However, this power has also turned against archaeology, because the discipline has been dealt with perfunctorily as a mere provider of metaphors that other intellectuals have exploited. Scholars from different fields continue to explore areas in which archaeologists have been working for over two centuries, with little or no reference to the discipline. It seems that excavation, stratigraphy or ruins only become important at a trans-disciplinary level when people from outside archaeology pay attention to them and somehow dematerialize them. Meanwhile, archaeologists have been usually more interested in borrowing theories from other fields, rather than in developing the theoretical potential of the same concepts that other thinkers find so useful. The time is ripe for archaeologists to address a wider audience and engage in theoretical debates from a position of equality, not of subalternity. __Reclaiming Archaeology__ explores how archaeology can be useful to rethink modernity’s big issues, and more specifically late modernity (broadly understood as the 20^th^ and 21^st^ centuries). The book contains a series of original essays, not necessarily following the conventional academic rules of archaeological writing or thinking, allowing rhetoric to have its place in disclosing the archaeological. In each of the four sections that constitute this book (method, time, heritage and materiality), the contributors deal with different archaeological tropes, such as excavation, surface/depth, genealogy, ruins, fragments, repressed memories and traces. They criticize their modernist implications and rework them in creative ways, in order to show the power of archaeology not just to understand the past, but also the present. includes essays from a diverse array of archaeologists who have dealt in one way or another with modernity, including scholars from non-Anglophone countries who have approached the issue in original ways during recent years, as well as contributors from other fields who engage in a creative dialogue with archaeology and the work of archaeologists. Reclaiming archaeology / Alfredo González-Ruibal The clearing : archaeology's way of opening the world / Matt Edgeworth Scratching the surface : reassembling an archaeology in and of the present / Rodney Harrison. From excavation to archaeological X-Files / Dawid Kobialka Digging alternative archaeologies / Cristóbal Gnecco Evestigation, nomethodology and deictics : movements in un-disciplining archaeology / Alejandro Haber Archaeology and photography : a pragmatology / Michael Shanks and Connie Svabo New cultural landscapes: archaeological method as artistic practice / Bárbara Fluxá The business of archaeology is the present / Laurent Olivier Which archaeology? : a question of chronopolitics / Christopher Witmore The politics of periodization / Charles Orser Change, individuality and reason, or, How archaeology has legitimized a patriarchal modernity / Almudena Hernando Indigeneity and time : towards a decolonization of archaeological temporal categories and tools / Gustavo Verdesio Enacted multi-temporality : the archaeological site as a shared, performative space / Yannis Hamilakis and Efthimis Theou. The new heritage and re-shapings of the past / Cornelius Holtorf and Graham Fairclough The archaeological gaze / Gabriel Moshenska In the shade of Frederick Douglass : the archaeology of Wye House / Mark Leone, Amanda Tang, Elizabeth Pruitt and Benjamin Skolnik Ruin memory : a hauntology of Cape Town / Nick Shepherd A thoroughly modern park : Mapungubwe, UNESCO and indigenous heritage / Lynn Meskell Days in Hong-Kong, May 2011 / Denis Byrne The charter'd Thames / Sefryn Penrose The return of what? / Bjørnar Olsen Inside is out : an epistemology of surfaces and substances / Paul Graves-Brown Fragments as something more : archaeological experience and reflection / Mats Burström Bringing a place in ruins back to life / Gastón Gordillo Cutting the earth/cutting the body / Douglass Bailey Archaeological remains of oil based urbanity / Camilo José Vergara Milieux de mémoire / Martin Hall. "Reclaiming Archaeology includes essays from a diverse array of archaeologists who have dealt in one way or another with modernity, including scholars from non-Anglophone countries who have approached the issue in original ways during recent years, as well as contributors from other fields who engage in a creative dialogue with archaeology and the work of archaeologists...."--Publisher description