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contemporary arts has been. As we will see, the name “Leonora Carrington” has become both a conduit for ideas and a conceptual framework that enables the reincarnation of artefacts, practices, and activisms. Yet without her raw materials, her detailed iconography, her visionary imagination and sheer skillset, the exponential interest in her work would not exist. Indeed, her manipulation of media and epic, labour-intensive techniques are necessary to unearth archaeologically from the outset. In Linda Hutcheon's words, we may need to acquire a certain “media literacy” or
An archaeology of lunacy examines the historic lunatic asylum from an interdisciplinary perspective, employing methods drawn from archaeology, social geography, and history to create a holistic view of the built heritage of the asylum as a distinctive building type. In the popular imagination, historic lunatic asylums were dark, monolithic, and homogenous, instruments for social confinement and punishment. This book aims to redress this historical reputation, showing how the built environment and material worlds of lunatic asylums were distinctive and idiosyncratic – and highly regional. They were also progressive spaces and proving grounds of architectural experimentation, where the reformed treatment practices known as moral management were trialled and refined. The standing remains of the nineteenth-century lunatic asylum system represent a unique opportunity to study a building-type in active transition, both materially and ideologically. When they were constructed, asylums were a composite of reform ideals, architectural materials, and innovative design approaches. An archaeological study of these institutions can offer a materially focused examination of how the buildings worked on a daily basis. This study combines critical analysis of the architecture, material remains, and historical documentary sources for lunatic asylums in England and Ireland. Students and scholars of later historical archaeology and built heritage will find the book a useful overview of this institutional site type, while historians of medicine will find the focus on interior design and architecture of use. The general public, for whom asylums frequently represent shadowy ruins or anonymous redevelopments, may be interested in learning more about the buildings.
This book is the first monograph-length investigation of innovation and the innovation process from an archaeological perspective. We live in a world where innovation, innovativeness, creativity, and invention are almost laughably over-used buzzwords. Yet comparatively little research has been carried out on the long-term history of innovation beyond and before the Industrial Revolution. This monograph offers both a response and a sort of answer to the wider trans-disciplinary dialogue on innovation, invention, and technological and social change. The idea of innovation that permeates our popular media and our political and scientific discourse is set against the long-term perspective that only archaeology can offer in dialogue with a range of social theory about the development of new technologies and social structures. The book offers a new version of the story of human inventiveness from our earliest hominin ancestors to the present day. In doing so, it challenges the contemporary lionization of disruptive technologies, while also setting the post-Industrial-Revolution innovation boom into a deeper temporal and wider cultural context. It argues that the present narrow focus on pushing the adoption of technical innovations ignores the complex interplay of social, technological, and environmental systems that underlies truly innovative societies; the inherent connections between new technologies, technologists, and social structure that give them meaning and make them valuable; and the significance and value of conservative social practices that lead to the frequent rejection of innovations.
1 How archaeological communities think: re-thinking Ludwik Fleck’s concept of the thought-collective according to the case of Serbian archaeology Monika Milosavljević Both thinking and facts are changeable, if only because changes in thinking manifest themselves in changed facts. Conversely, fundamentally new facts can be discovered only through new thinking. (Fleck, 1981: 50–51; translated by Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn). Introduction Serbian archaeology offers fertile ground in which to apply Fleck’s concepts of thought-collectives and thought
The dynamic processes of knowledge production in archaeology and elsewhere in the humanities and social sciences are increasingly viewed within the context of negotiation, cooperation and exchange, as the collaborative effort of groups, clusters and communities of scholars. Shifting focus from the individual scholar to the wider social contexts of her work, this volume investigates the importance of informal networks and conversation in the creation of knowledge about the past, and takes a closer look at the dynamic interaction and exchange that takes place between individuals, groups and clusters of scholars in the wider social settings of scientific work. Various aspects of and mechanisms at work behind the interaction and exchange that takes place between the individual scholar and her community, and the creative processes that such encounters trigger, are critically examined in eleven chapters which draw on a wide spectrum of examples from Europe and North America: from early modern antiquarians to archaeological societies and practitioners at work during the formative years of the modern archaeological disciplines and more recent examples from the twentieth century. The individual chapters engage with theoretical approaches to scientific creativity, knowledge production and interaction such as sociology and geographies of science, and actor-network theory (ANT) in their examination of individual–collective interplay. The book caters to readers both from within and outside the archaeological disciplines; primarily intended for researchers, teachers and students in archaeology, anthropology, classics and the history of science, it will also be of interest to the general reader.
queer sexual fantasy through archaeological excavation and reconstruction. Additionally, calling upon the sphinx to re-enact the ancient Egyptian myth in which Isis rebuilds the fragmented remains of Osiris, the speaker invokes a process of archaeological excavation and reconstruction that the poem itself enacts throughout. Imagining the sphinx leading him through millennia of time, layers of dust and
singularly Wheeler construed archaeology’s military legacy. In Archaeology from the Earth (1954), he heralded its organisation, precision and ‘discipline’ as a model for archaeological fieldwork: Meanwhile, it is scarcely necessary to observe that the [archaeological] director cannot be an expert in every branch of his work, any more than a general is an expert in every tank or gun under his command. But, just as a general must be exactly familiar with the performance – the range, fire-power, mobility, and so forth – of every arm available to him or his enemy, so
The Kulmhof extermination camp in Chełmno nad Nerem was the first camp set up by the Nazis to exterminate Jews during the Second World War. The history of Kulmhof has long been an area of interest for academics, but despite thorough research it remains one of the least-known places of its kind among the public. Studies of the role of archaeology in acquiring knowledge about the functioning of the camp have been particularly compelling. The excavations carried out intermittently over a thirty-year period (1986–2016), which constitute the subject of this article, have played a key role in the rise in public interest in the history of the camp.
3 An archaeology of anthropomorphism: upping the ontological ante of Alfred Gell’s anthropology of art through a focus on making Benjamin Alberti Introduction: the question of anthropomorphism One cannot see God from the back. (Gell 1998: 192) Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency (1998) revolutionised the debate on agency in archaeology, melding exceptionally well with contemporary thinking on the dialectic of human–thing interactions, the biography of objects and the relationships between agents and structures (e.g. Alberti 2001; Jones 2001; 2012; Jones and Cochrane
before you. 6 This chapter reveals how Pater’s highly stylised generic and artistic hybridisation, along with a few other literary portraits it helped to inspire, were shaped in great part not only by archaeological discourse broadly but also by an often neglected key archaeological tract from the seventeenth century