Michael Shanks: Home

Archaeologist at Stanford

Edlingham, Northumberland UK

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 (ten years and more looking through the lens of ceramics and urban design), 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, long term social and cultural trends, 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. Because making and using things makes us who we are.

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). I think that the Arts and Humanities are a fascinating research laboratory, helping us think freshly about how we have got to be where we are - and what we might do about it.

Above all, perhaps, I am currently enjoying a renewed childhood with my children Molly and Ben, who forever remind me to wonder at the most mundane of things, and to connect our fascination with the past with the legacies we leave behind for the future.

See Short biographies

Summer 2007 and 2008 - I was 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, the history of science and the character of regional history and identity.

Summer 2009 - we begin excavation of Binchester Roman Fort in the borders, just south of Hadrian's Wall. This is a project with Durham University UK and will involve a summer field school and master class.

Summer 2008 - Stanford Strategy Studio (formerly Stanford Strategy Center) continues in development - "great conversations that make a difference" - applied arts and humanities - and now allied with Palo Alto Strategy Studios.

Spring 2009 - my Weblog is slowly reviving, albeit in fits and starts!

Main menu

Labs/studios

Metamedia - my lab at Stanford, housed within Stanford Archaeology Center - design history, media materialities and long-term trends - currently undergoing a shift into more tightly focused projects concerned with social modeling and run through a new paradigm - digitally-enabled research networks

Stanford Humanities Lab - experimental research and development in transdisciplinary arts and humanities - animating cultural archives, building bridges to bigger pictures on matters of common human concern, enabling collaborative co-creation in the new Humanities - I direct SHL with Jeffrey Schnapp and Henry Lowood. Jeffrey is off to Harvard next year (2009/2010) and we'll undoubtedly see the lab change without his inspiring leadership.

Stanford Strategy Studio - "great conversations that make a difference" - building transdisciplinary bridges to a bigger long-term perspective to enable more informed thinking and decision making around matters of common and pressing human concern - applied arts and humanities

ALSO

Stanford Archaeology Center - having arrived at Stanford in 1999, I became senior founding faculty of our new Archaeology Center

Stanford Department of Classics - my home department

Events and recent works

A theory of assemblage TAG 2009 Stanford

Designing digital media - perspectives from the Humanities and Arts - for a colloquium at Stanford in association with the INVENTIO initiative - April 2009

Presence - the conference - the Presence Project reaches a culmination after five years work with a conference at Exeter University UK. I introduced Lynn Hershman and delivered a keynote - March 2009

Scott and Gell - Walter Scott and William Gell: from Marmion to the Morea - some lessons in topography and topology for contemporary reconstructions of antiquity. A talk at Brown University - March 2009

Long term perspectives on innovation - Emerce Rotterdam - an interview with Erwin Boogert of Emerce magazine (Netherlands) - December 2008

Life Squared SFMOMA - our work with Lynn Hershman Leeson reaches San Francisco Museum of Modern Art - November 2008 - February 2009

International Advisory Board, Rotterdam - I have joined this prestigious group to offer perspectives on cultural heritage as an essential component of economic development in the largest port in the world - [link] - November 2008

Next Web Salon, Amsterdam - a small group of Dutch (mainly) information technophiles. I talked about storytelling and the web - September 2008 [link]

Video as social agent - introduction to three new works commissioned by the Tate Gallery - September 2008

The (digital) future of the university museum - keynote at the UMAC Conference, Manchester UK - September 2008

Digital Humanities - a vision - some thoughts from summer 2008

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 fine 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

Stanford Strategy Studio

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 2005-2009 - [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

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 2009

Archaeology - the discipline of things - a book in progress with Bjørnar Olsen, Tim Webmoor and Chris Witmore, to be published by California University Press in 2009

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 2008.

Full list - Research and Projects

Blogs and new media

all the following are undergoing major remodeling and rethinking

Weblog - all things archaeological - [link] - migrating to a new life

Archaeographer - the photoblog 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, mainly in the Borders of Scotland/England - [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] - disbanded 2007

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 ;-)