Notes from Michael Shanks on an archaeological sensibility in the design and construction of knowledge.

My basic interest is in building rich encounters with sites, collections, materials, texts, narratives - rich empirical encounters that are open because they do not pre-order the object of interest by presuming categories, narratives, structures.

This is an heretical empirics

• empirics - the rich attention and retention of detail and texture

• heretical - because of the denial of orthodox categories and accounts

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Basic principles

• our collective historical agency - we are all archaeologists now - archaeology is not the discovery of the past and the primary role of the archaeologist is not stewardship - archaeologists work on what is left of the past, and this is creative and productive labor

• rather than contain and control the past, facilitate its dispersal

• artifacts are fields of relations rather than self-contained objects

• the the fallacy of representation entails non-representational strategies and models of the past

• these strategies involve the exploration of open networks of linkage - an archaeological poetics or erotics

• celebrate discontinuity ( as a fundamental feature of archaeological temporality and the articulation/mediation of past and present)

• specific techniques include parataxis and katachresis

• critique is always implicated - the ephemeral and tactical insertion of past into present

• experimentation, constant movement and learning - the aesthetic of these temporary autonomous zones (autonomous in their refusal of easy narrative containment) may well be ugly, discomforting, disruptive

• indeterminate and percolating temporalities (layering and interpenetration)

• site specific production - the location of this critical poetics will invoke centers and peripheries.

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What does this look like? - read Theatre/archaeology, written with Mike Pearson, and especially the last chapter.

Plunge into Three Rooms and Sicliy - archaeological moments.

But remember -

this is chaotic and disruptive

An heretical empirics is all about building (archaeological) relationships with the mess that is history

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The microlecture Archaeology - implications for historiography ends here.

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Notes - Feb 2007

emergent effects of collaborative research

looking where you would not otherwise look

following the material in questioning paradigmatic classifications (cf Bowker)

making connections that would not occur under a cleaner, less noisy relationship with the past

this is a major rationale for hypertextual content driven applications that work with dynamic changing data sets and documents (wikis) - rebuilding infrastructures

examples -

Dunstanburgh - the site as sepctacle

Greek perfume jars

three rooms

33 moments - follow through the connections and MP is not about Elimi etc but a series of disconnected narratives and relationships

an heretical empirics requires a quite different research strategy of heterogeneous linkage - you are forced to ask about hils in the west of Sicily, WWII, Mozia ... etc - forced to open doors

this is to avoid imposing categories and narratives - as was happening when I was there - the implementation of a particular intellectual infrastructure and set of standards

hence the bitterness of "the empty tables" - the imposition of intellectual infrastructure and our exclusion - closed doors

DCX - empirics challenging demographics

Premises and arguments for this heretical empirics -

• information is a verb - an argument for dynamic documentation [link]

• agile information design and archaeological authorship - [link]

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