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
- 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.
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
The microlecture Archaeology - implications for historiography ends here.
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]
