Michael Shanks - Archaeologist: Home

Edlingham, Northumberland UK

Michael Shanks - Archaeologist at Stanford

My archaeology began, and continues, in the Roman borders of the north of England and Scotland, exploring Hadrian's Wall, the great medieval city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, then north through the heartland of Celtic Christianity and the landscapes of Walter Scott. I have also specialized in studying the first Greek cities in the Mediterranean, as well as early farming societies and their monuments in Wessex and Sweden - new models and stories of early agriculture, the first cities and empires, and how much the modern world has in common with antiquity.

My archaeology is a bridging field. For me, archaeologists do not discover the past; they work on what remains. Archaeology is about our relationships with what is left of the past.

We are all archaeologists now ...

More of this Manifesto in the archaeological imagination - [link]

Archaeology - design history. Pragmatogony - the geneaology of things - where things come from. These are two topics that fascinate me. I have also always adored the company of artists - my wife Helen works in ceramics (see some of her fabulous work here - [link]). I have had the privilege of working with some wonderful talents - notably Brith Gof, Lynn Hershman and the members of the Presence Project).

Above all, perhaps, I am currently enjoying a renewed childhood with my children Molly and Ben, who forever remind me of how to be fascinated by the most mundane of things.

Short biography

Summer 2007 and 2008 - I am researching antiquarian John Wallis in the Roman borders of England/Scotland - Borderlands - Tyne to Tweed. This has become a case study in a research network focused upon Anglo-American-Antiquarians.

2007-2008 I am the Violet Andrews Whittier Faculty Fellow at Stanford Humanities Center, writing about long-term archaeological perspectives on design history - Ten Things: An Archaeology of Design, and The Design of New Media: An Archaeological Perspective.

Main menu

Labs/studios

Metamedia - my lab at Stanford - archaeological research in design history and media materialities - [link] - currently undergoing a shift into more tightly focused projects run through digitally-enabled research networks

Stanford Archaeology Center - multidisciplinary directions in archaeological research and teaching

Stanford Humanities Lab - experimental research and development in transdisciplinary arts and humanities - animating cultural archives, building bridges to bigger pictures on matters of common concern, enabling collaborative co-creation in the new Humanities - I direct SHL with Jeffrey Schnapp and Henry Lowood - [link]

A note on - the idea of a Humanities Lab - from stewardship to production

News/Events

Designing digital tool kits for the Arts and Humanities - an intervention at "Bamboo" Planning Project, Berkeley April 29 2008 (a project between Berkeley and Chicago to work with the Mellon Foundation in building infrastructures and tool kits for research in the Arts and Humanities)

Figure-ground relationships and the archaeological imagination - Keynote at "Art is History" - graduate symposium, San José State University - April 12 2008

"There's no place like "domus" - California Classical Association Spring Conference, April 5 2008. As Vice-President of CCA I hosted this fascinating panel discussion in the Archaeology Center. David Smith (ex-Stanford Classics), President, did a great job of organizing the speakers - [link]

Archive and memory in virtual worlds - for the Media X Conference, Stanford - discussion with Pat Hanrahan, Vladlen Koltun, Byron Reeves and Jeremy Bailenson - March 2008

Entitled Opinions - with Robert Harrison - a radio talk on KZSU about the origins of agriculture (and much more) - February 5 2008

Artereality - a manifesto for arts education in the US - written with Jeffrey Schnapp (Stanford Humanities Lab) for a new collection - What Is Art Education? A 21st-Century Question, edited by Steven Madoff, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008)

TAG 2007 York UK - reworking Shanks and Tilley - a conference session looking back at my work in the 80s with Chris Tilley - December 2007. Now to be a book edited by James Dixon (Bristol)

Collaboration and research networks in the Humanities - Getty Research Institute - November 2007

The future of the museum - discussion with Dominic Willsdon and Rudolf Frieling of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art - November 2007

Life Squared - an animated archive - a talk in Manchester - Manchester Whitworth Gallery - November 2007 - A symposium on Lynn Hershman - Download
View Document Icon Life-squared-Manchester.mov

Beyond Powerpoint - Google tech talk on presentation software - November 2007

With Lynn Hershman in Seed Magazine - October 2007 - discussing our particular conjuncture of art and science

Symbolic and structural archaeology - the coggies 25 years on - a review of changes in archaeology since the paradigm-shifting book "Symbolic and structural archaeology" (Cambridge 1982) - with Chris Tilley I contributed a paper on the archaeology of the body in prehistoric farming society - Cambridge Archaeological Journal 2007

Life Squared Montreal - September - December 2007 - a manifestation of the mixed reality archive of Lynn's work at the Dante Hotel, San Francisco 1972

KZSU - radio interview on the archaeological imagination - May 2007

Politics of Presence - a colloquium at Stanford, part of the research workshop Critical studies in new media - May 2007

Archive 3.0 - the colloquium - a Stanford humanities Lab brain trust - Stanford Humanities Center - May 2007

Current projects

Ceramics - the materiality of a medium - new multidisciplinary and experimental research into ceramics - with Ian Hodder, Gail Mahood, Jody Maxmin - starting up January 2008

Anglo-American-antiquarians - an international research network - starting up 2007/2008 - designing the Bibliotheca Universalis Antiquaria and examining the place of the antiquarian tradition in the history of science

Presence - "Performing presence: from the live to the simulated" - an international collaborative project running from 2005-2010 - [link] Main funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK

Life-Squared - the future of the museum explored as we revisit with artist Lynn Hershman a hotel room in 1972 and build an archival experience in a virtual world - [link] - part of the Presence Project and funded by the Langlois Foundation

Ten Things: An Archaeology of Design, and The Design of New Media: An Archaeological Perspective - two closely connected writing projects I am finishing at Stanford Humanities Center 2007/2008. An early draft of ideas - Nine archaeological theses on design

Behind the locked door - an excavation of the storerooms of Stanford's Cantor Arts Center - April 2007 - March 2008

Borderlands - Tyne to Tweed a regional archaeology of the Roman north - as chorography - from 2004 through 2010

The archaeological imagination - a manifesto for Left Coast Press 2007/2008

A chorography of central Greece - a work in progress with Chris Witmore, the book to be completed in 2008

Archaeology - the discipline of things - a book in progress with Bjørnar Olsen, Tim Webmoor and Chris Witmore, to be completed in 2008 for California University Press

Conversations through archaeology - myself, Bill Rathje and a host of archaeologists in conversation about archaeology - experiences of the discipline, thoughts about what matters and what the future holds. With Sue Alcock, Lewis Binford, Victor Buchli, John Cherry, Meg Conkey, George Cowgill, Ian Hodder, Kristian Kristiansen, Mark Leone, Randall McGuire, Lynn Meskell, Mary and Adrian Praetzellis, Colin Renfrew, Michael Schiffer, Alain Schnapp, Patty Jo Watson, Alison Wylie. Completion Spring 2008.

Full list - Research and Projects

Blogs and new media

all the following are undergoing major remodeling during my sabbatical this year at Stanford Humanities Center

Weblog - all things archaeological - [link]

Archaeographer - exploring representations of all things archaeological - [link]

Figure and Ground - "at a scene of crime anything might be relevant" - experiments in an archaeological sensibility - [link]

Chorography - deep maps and temporal topographies in the Borders - [link]

Traumwerk - hypermedia and collaborative authoring - experiments in archaeological thinking, writing and imaging

Seminars/workshops

Critical studies in new media - Mellon sponsored graduate workshop run with Fred Turner and also sponsored by Stanford Humanities Center. 2006/2007 we explored the politics of presence [link] - we are currently on sabbatical

Stanford archaeological theory - a reading group at Stanford Archaeology Center devoted simply to thinking about what archaeologists do. It underwent restructuring during 2006/2007 and became Stanford Archaeology Club. Well, actually, the anti-intellectual caucus got the upper hand and decided that thinking about archaeology was a minority interest - so Stanford has lost its lifeblood of "thoughtful archaeology" - apart from here at Metamedia, that is ;-)

Website 2006 - http://metamedia.stanford.edu/projects/MichaelShanks

Though outdated, my original conventional web site site goes back several years and is still available - [link]