An archaeologist at Stanford
Address: https://mshanks.com | https://archaeographer.com | https://archaeolog.stanford.edu
Address: https://mshanks.com | https://archaeographer.com | https://archaeolog.stanford.edu
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Books by Michael Shanks
Their common interests: forms of (re)collection—the gatherings of memory practices; and site and locale—multi-temporal articulations, where different events and times endure and come together in the material forms of inhabited places, in the traces and remains of the past in the present.
This is a special extended edition of the review of their work that appears in the book "Art and Archaeology", edited by Andrew Cochrane and Ian Russell (Springer 2013).
Pearson|Shanks define their theatre/archaeology as the rearticulation of fragments of the past as real-time event. They offer new ways of engaging landscape and cityscape, of scripting and documenting encounter, new insights into the activation of memory and remains of the past in the performance of everyday life.
Gabriella Giannachi, Nick Kaye, and Michael Shanks (eds), Archaeologies of presence: Art, performance and the persistence of being, Routledge 2012.
of bold statements that reveal the human face of archaeology in our contemporary interest in the material remains of the past.
Literally the “science of old things,” archaeology does not discover the past as it was but works with what remains. Such work involves the mediation of past and present, of people and their cultural fabric, for things cannot be separated from society. Things are us, just as we are part of the world of things that we may seek to understand.
This book ranges through debates in science studies, including actor network theory and object oriented ontology, process-relational philosophy, material culture and design studies, and offers case studies from prehistoric, classical and historical archaeology.
Chapters:
Introduction: Caring about Things
2. The Ambiguity of Things: Contempt and Desire
3. Engagements with Things: The Making of Archaeology
4. Digging Deep: Archaeology and Fieldwork
5. Things in Translation: Documents and Imagery
6. Futures for Things: Memory Practices and
Digital Translation
7. Timely Things: From Argos to Mycenae and Beyond
8. Making and the Design of Things: Human Being
and the Shape of History
9. Getting on with Things: A Material Metaphysics of Care
Includes Hodder and Shanks on Processual, Postprocessual and Interpretive Archaeologies.
This is the 1997 publication of the seminar series in 1993, managed by Alain Schnapp and Laurent Olivier, that first consolidated interest and research into the archaeology of the contemporary past. The term was coined by Laurent in response to growing concern for the remains of the past-in-the-present (for example WW1 battle fields), and especially with respect to their active and material presence. The Maison des Sciences de l'Homme and the French Ministry of Culture, who funded the project, seem to have judged the notion of a contemporary past a little too radical, hence the published title of the collection.
I contributed a chapter about photography as a key component, a paradigm for this newly-named field (also posted on Academia.edu).
I wrote this book while still making my way into archaeology - it brought together what I had been saying with Chris Tilley in the 1980s with a personal vision of what the archaeogical past means to many people now.
The book takes risks with experimental writing and imaging, including eidetics and collage. Twenty five years after publication it is pleasing to see that much of what I was writing about then has come to figure significantly in archaeological thinking:
— the book is a kind of analysis of the discourse of archaeology and exemplifies an interest in how the past may be mediated - written and visualized - imagery, simulation, narrative
— the book argues for an extension of archaeological interest to include the contemporary world - archaeologies of the contemporary past, with a particular focus upon the convergence of archaeology and contemporary art
— in this the book deals with archaeology's cultural associations with modernity - horror fiction to gardening, forensics to fakery
— the cultural politics of archaeology are revealed through an ethnography of archaeology, archaeologists and those with archaeological interests
the book argues for a new conception of heritage - not academic disdain for popular interest in the remains of the past, but a celebration of certain kinds of actuality that embody creative relationships with the past
— rather than have archaeology only engaged in explaining and interpreting the past, the book argues for a post-interpretive turn to take us beyond epistemology into work upon the materiality of the past - ontologies of relationship between past and present
— this means thinking about the materiality of cultural experience and its embodiment - a focus on experiences past and present in a process-relational paradigm related to a reading of Nietzsche, Bergson, Adorno's negative dialectics, and Deleuze's nomadics.
Their common interests: forms of (re)collection—the gatherings of memory practices; and site and locale—multi-temporal articulations, where different events and times endure and come together in the material forms of inhabited places, in the traces and remains of the past in the present.
This is a special extended edition of the review of their work that appears in the book "Art and Archaeology", edited by Andrew Cochrane and Ian Russell (Springer 2013).
Pearson|Shanks define their theatre/archaeology as the rearticulation of fragments of the past as real-time event. They offer new ways of engaging landscape and cityscape, of scripting and documenting encounter, new insights into the activation of memory and remains of the past in the performance of everyday life.
Gabriella Giannachi, Nick Kaye, and Michael Shanks (eds), Archaeologies of presence: Art, performance and the persistence of being, Routledge 2012.
of bold statements that reveal the human face of archaeology in our contemporary interest in the material remains of the past.
Literally the “science of old things,” archaeology does not discover the past as it was but works with what remains. Such work involves the mediation of past and present, of people and their cultural fabric, for things cannot be separated from society. Things are us, just as we are part of the world of things that we may seek to understand.
This book ranges through debates in science studies, including actor network theory and object oriented ontology, process-relational philosophy, material culture and design studies, and offers case studies from prehistoric, classical and historical archaeology.
Chapters:
Introduction: Caring about Things
2. The Ambiguity of Things: Contempt and Desire
3. Engagements with Things: The Making of Archaeology
4. Digging Deep: Archaeology and Fieldwork
5. Things in Translation: Documents and Imagery
6. Futures for Things: Memory Practices and
Digital Translation
7. Timely Things: From Argos to Mycenae and Beyond
8. Making and the Design of Things: Human Being
and the Shape of History
9. Getting on with Things: A Material Metaphysics of Care
Includes Hodder and Shanks on Processual, Postprocessual and Interpretive Archaeologies.
This is the 1997 publication of the seminar series in 1993, managed by Alain Schnapp and Laurent Olivier, that first consolidated interest and research into the archaeology of the contemporary past. The term was coined by Laurent in response to growing concern for the remains of the past-in-the-present (for example WW1 battle fields), and especially with respect to their active and material presence. The Maison des Sciences de l'Homme and the French Ministry of Culture, who funded the project, seem to have judged the notion of a contemporary past a little too radical, hence the published title of the collection.
I contributed a chapter about photography as a key component, a paradigm for this newly-named field (also posted on Academia.edu).
I wrote this book while still making my way into archaeology - it brought together what I had been saying with Chris Tilley in the 1980s with a personal vision of what the archaeogical past means to many people now.
The book takes risks with experimental writing and imaging, including eidetics and collage. Twenty five years after publication it is pleasing to see that much of what I was writing about then has come to figure significantly in archaeological thinking:
— the book is a kind of analysis of the discourse of archaeology and exemplifies an interest in how the past may be mediated - written and visualized - imagery, simulation, narrative
— the book argues for an extension of archaeological interest to include the contemporary world - archaeologies of the contemporary past, with a particular focus upon the convergence of archaeology and contemporary art
— in this the book deals with archaeology's cultural associations with modernity - horror fiction to gardening, forensics to fakery
— the cultural politics of archaeology are revealed through an ethnography of archaeology, archaeologists and those with archaeological interests
the book argues for a new conception of heritage - not academic disdain for popular interest in the remains of the past, but a celebration of certain kinds of actuality that embody creative relationships with the past
— rather than have archaeology only engaged in explaining and interpreting the past, the book argues for a post-interpretive turn to take us beyond epistemology into work upon the materiality of the past - ontologies of relationship between past and present
— this means thinking about the materiality of cultural experience and its embodiment - a focus on experiences past and present in a process-relational paradigm related to a reading of Nietzsche, Bergson, Adorno's negative dialectics, and Deleuze's nomadics.
Note that the images in the PDF do not display well onscreen in academia.edu. They are good however in the download.
Speculative design meets archaeological critique — a provocation or intervention in a matter of contemporary concern. One of five commentaries on a series of exhibitions at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Speculative design meets archaeological critique — a provocation or intervention in a matter of contemporary concern. One of five commentaries on a series of exhibitions at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Speculative design meets archaeological critique — a provocation or intervention in a matter of contemporary concern. One of five commentaries on a series of exhibitions at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Speculative design meets archaeological critique — a provocation or intervention in a matter of contemporary concern. One of five commentaries on a series of exhibitions at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Speculative design meets archaeological critique — a provocation or intervention in a matter of contemporary concern. One of five commentaries on a series of exhibitions at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Looking at what might be called the political economy of visual media—the work they do in archaeology through networks of production, circulation, transaction, and articulation—also leads us to identify some of the implications of emergent digital media, not for more spectacular summations of data about the past, but as open forums for the co-production of pasts that matter now and for community building in the future.
A summary description and critical assessment of the character, scope, and working of the archaeological imagination since the seventeenth century.
"Imagining past lives experienced through ruins and remains: telling the story of a prehistoric village through the remains of the site and its artifacts. And more: dealing with the return of childhood memories, or designing an archive for a corporation. The archaeological imagination is a creative capacity mobilized when we experience traces and vestiges of the past, when we gather, classify, conserve and restore, when we work with such remains, collections, archives to deliver narratives, reconstructions, accounts, explanations, or whatever ..."
Journal of Problem Based Learning in Higher Education: Integrating Academic and Artistic Methodologies within a problem-based learning environment (special issue), 2018
How to cite this work:
Shanks, M., & Svabo, C. (2018). Scholartistry: Incorporating Scholarship and Art. Journal of Problem Based Learning in Higher Education,
The International Advisory Board (IAB) was established in 2004 by the Municipal Executive of the city. The aim was to deliver long term macro-economic perspectives and practical recommendations from an international point of view that would support the Municipal Executive and the city’s stakeholders in making best choices for the future of Rotterdam.
Members brought diverse experience and expertise from other communities, business, politics, and academia. They got to know the city over at least three years and offered informed comment on planning and decision making in annual meetings. As Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb put it, the Board held a mirror to the people of Rotterdam that they might see their challenges and choices more clearly.
This was an exercise in strategic foresight and planning.
The International Advisory Board (IAB) was established in 2004 by the Municipal Executive of the city. The aim was to deliver long term macro-economic perspectives and practical recommendations from an international point of view that would support the Municipal Executive and the city’s stakeholders in making best choices for the future of Rotterdam.
Members brought diverse experience and expertise from other communities, business, politics, and academia. They got to know the city over at least three years and offered informed comment on planning and decision making in annual meetings. As Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb put it, the Board held a mirror to the people of Rotterdam that they might see their challenges and choices more clearly.
This was an exercise in strategic foresight and planning.
The International Advisory Board (IAB) was established in 2004 by the Municipal Executive of the city. The aim was to deliver long term macro-economic perspectives and practical recommendations from an international point of view that would support the Municipal Executive and the city’s stakeholders in making best choices for the future of Rotterdam.
Members brought diverse experience and expertise from other communities, business, politics, and academia. They got to know the city over at least three years and offered informed comment on planning and decision making in annual meetings. As Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb put it, the Board held a mirror to the people of Rotterdam that they might see their challenges and choices more clearly.
This was an exercise in strategic foresight and planning.
The International Advisory Board (IAB) was established in 2004 by the Municipal Executive of the city. The aim was to deliver long term macro-economic perspectives and practical recommendations from an international point of view that would support the Municipal Executive and the city’s stakeholders in making best choices for the future of Rotterdam.
Members brought diverse experience and expertise from other communities, business, politics, and academia. They got to know the city over at least three years and offered informed comment on planning and decision making in annual meetings. As Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb put it, the Board held a mirror to the people of Rotterdam that they might see their challenges and choices more clearly.
This was an exercise in strategic foresight and planning.
The International Advisory Board (IAB) was established in 2004 by the Municipal Executive of the city. The aim was to deliver long term macro-economic perspectives and practical recommendations from an international point of view that would support the Municipal Executive and the city’s stakeholders in making best choices for the future of Rotterdam.
Members brought diverse experience and expertise from other communities, business, politics, and academia. They got to know the city over at least three years and offered informed comment on planning and decision making in annual meetings. As Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb put it, the Board held a mirror to the people of Rotterdam that they might see their challenges and choices more clearly.
This was an exercise in strategic foresight and planning.
First appeared online at https://mshanks.com.
This is a talk I gave at the online meetings of the European Association of Archaeologists in August 2020. It was part of a session convened by Felipe Criado-Boado and Kristian Kristiansen, who had been organizers of the meetings in Santiago de Compostela in 1995. They asked contributors to reflect upon 25 years of change in European Archaeology.
I have been immensely influenced by the extraordinary leadership and vision of Felipe and Kristian, by the welcoming humanism of so many members of the EAA. My talk explores how we might conceive an archaeology that is centered upon community, collegiality, dialogue, in working with what remains of the past to build a better future.
A talk given at the meetings of the European Association of Archaeologists 2020.
With an appendix on speculative modeling - John Beazley, Sherlock Holmes, Carlo Ginzburg and Charles Peirce.
Available as a video at https://vimeo.com/452762424
As I complete a book that presents a model of the working of Graeco-Roman antiquity, as I help curate a collection of works that explore the common ground between contemporary archaeology and the fine arts, as I start up a project that aims to reframe how we understand urban dwelling, as I explore the potential of design process as a paradigm for creative agency and radical pedagogy, I find myself reviewing the evolution of the foundations of the archaeology I have pursued since the 1970s.
This is a draft of a talk that makes a case that understanding archaeological experiences and agency in the design process offer some rich and fertile answers to these questions. I aim to explain the basics of ways of understanding things as dynamic process and motion, connected, where relations are internal to something, where dynamic shifting connections are what makes things what they are.
This schema has been elaborated by Gabriella Giannachi in her book about the archive from MIT Press — Archive Everything: Mapping the Everyday (2016).
Mike has been a key figure in Welsh theatre, in European theatre, in physical and experimental devised performance. There have already been many wonderful tributes to his life and qualities, to his work in theatre, to his generous humanity.
I want to add to these with a personal reflection upon the extraordinary intellectual scope, range and depth of his art.
I find this very difficult. It’s not possible to disentangle our collaboration, and I am concerned to witness his unique voice. To acknowledge also the enormous inspiration and support of his network of friends and colleagues. So I apologize in advance if I am not sensitive enough, or if I could have spoken more of those who have given us so much support.
In some ways what follows is a kind of summary of what Mike and I called theatre/archaeology, a concept, set of projects, focus of conversation over 30 years. I have found it appropriate to offer a good deal of detail to explain how it connected with Mike’s performances, less how it relates to my archaeology. I apologize if the reader finds it rather long. I have tried to break it into clear and coherent sections.
Part 2 of a review of Confronting Classics, by Mary Beard.
This review first appeared at https://mshanks.com.
I use my review of this fascinating and provocative book to argue that we need to engage with the materiality of what we are researching as anthropologists and archaeologists. And that this is a matter of presence (and absence).
We sometimes think that the way to reproduce presence, a sense of “being there”, is through rich immersive media. On the contrary, these tiny, almost opaque mirrors on the past bridge the temporal gap between then and now through the faintest of traces.
The images are a testament to Adorno’s aphorism—“the best magnifying glass is a splinter in the eye”.
This is part of an effort to revive the old genre of chorography—inscription on the land, offering diverse engagement and account in manifolds of "chora"—the ancient Greek word that means the land and its people, inhabitation, regional experiences that make us, and all with which we connect, what we are and might be.
This collection, Coast, is the first of three parts to Itinerarium Septentrionale; it is set mostly in the northern half of Northumberland and oriented on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne. The second, Ad Fines, moves north along Dere Street, the old Roman road into Scotland through the middle of the county, into the landscapes of Walter Scott and the border abbeys. The third part of the journey is Coquetdale, following the river Coquet from its remote source up in the Cheviot Hills by Dere Street, down to the coast at Warkworth, site of the ruined medieval palace of the Percy family.
This book details the components of the archaeological imagination by connecting its origins in the eighteenth century with popular culture, the heritage industry and academic interests today.
"Michael Shanks, with all his wit, charm and smarts, shows us how the world of contemporary object studies – art history, archaeology and anthropology – is the living heir to the long thought dead antiquarian tradition. With this Copernican Revolution many old warhorse categories fall away and new ways of thinking materiality come into clear focus." - Peter N. Miller, Dean, Bard Graduate Center:
Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture.
"This important book provides a much-needed critical perspective revealing the intellectual, historical and practical depths of archaeology’s embedded role within cultural production. Presenting archaeology as creative practice, Shanks frees the archaeological sensibility from its dependence on positivistic science to enjoy the riches of transdisciplinary creativity which it never should be denied. The Archaeological Imagination is a long overdue and potent source of inspiration for practitioners across the humanities, sciences and visual and material arts, reminding us that the past as narrative and image is a precious resource, but one that is renewable through well-intentioned, reflexive acts of creative mediation." - Ian Alden Russell, Curator, David Winton Bell Gallery, List Art Center, Brown University.
This book details the components of the archaeological imagination by connecting its origins in the eighteenth century with popular culture, the heritage industry and academic interests today.
This file is of the introduction and the case studies that plot the origins of the archaeological imagination in the eighteenth century, as well as offering examples from contemporary popular culture.
Literally the “science of old things,” archaeology does not discover the past as it was but must work with what remains. Such work involves the tangible mediation of past and present, of people and their cultural fabric, for things cannot be separated from society. Things are us. This book does not set forth a sweeping new theory. It does not seek to transform the discipline of archaeology. Rather, it aims to understand precisely what archaeologists do and to urge practitioners toward a renewed focus on and care for things."
REVIEWS:
"It is engagingly concerned with the archaeology of the present. It has a rich and up-to-date bibliography, well versed in archaeological theory. It invites us, in an informed way, to reexamine the nature and substance of archaeology. So, despite its lapses, it stands on the side of angels."
- Colin Renfrew, University of Cambridge
"A broad, illuminating, and well-researched overview of theoretical problems pertaining to archaeology. The authors make a calm defense of the role of objects against tedious claims of 'fetishism.'"
-Graham Harman, author of The Quadruple Object
"This book exhorts the reader to embrace the materiality of archaeology by recognizing how every step in the discipline's scientific processes involves interaction with myriad physical artifacts, ranging from the camel-hair brush to profile drawings to virtual reality imaging. At the same time, the reader is taken on a phenomenological journey into various pasts, immersed in the lives of peoples from other times, compelled to engage their senses with the sights, smells, and noises of the publics and places whose remains they study. This is a refreshingly original and provocative look at the meaning of the material culture that lies at the foundation of the archaeological discipline."
-Michael Brian Schiffer, author of The Material Life of Human Beings
“This volume is a radical call to fundamentally rethink the ontology, profession, and practice of archaeology. The authors present a closely reasoned, epistemologically sound argument for why archaeology should be considered the discipline of things, rather than its more commonplace definition as the study of the human past through material traces. All scholars and students of archaeology will need to read and contemplate this thought-provoking book.”
-Wendy Ashmore, Professor of Anthropology, UC Riverside
Literally the “science of old things,” archaeology does not discover the past as it was but must work with what remains. Such work involves the tangible mediation of past and present, of people and their cultural fabric, for things cannot be separated from society. Things are us. This book does not set forth a sweeping new theory. It does not seek to transform the discipline of archaeology. Rather, it aims to understand precisely what archaeologists do and to urge practitioners toward a renewed focus on and care for things."
"Michael Shanks, with all his wit, charm and smarts, shows us how the world of contemporary object studies – art history, archaeology and anthropology – is the living heir to the long thought dead antiquarian tradition. With this Copernican Revolution many old warhorse categories fall away and new ways of thinking materiality come into clear focus." Peter N. Miller, Dean, Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture.
"This important book provides a much-needed critical perspective revealing the intellectual, historical and practical depths of archaeology’s embedded role within cultural production. Presenting archaeology as creative practice, Shanks frees the archaeological sensibility from its dependence on positivistic science to enjoy the riches of transdisciplinary creativity which it never should be denied. The Archaeological Imagination is a long overdue and potent source of inspiration for practitioners across the humanities, sciences and visual and material arts, reminding us that the past as narrative and image is a precious resource, but one that is renewable through well-intentioned, reflexive acts of creative mediation." - Ian Alden Russell, Curator, David Winton Bell Gallery | List Art Center, Brown University.
Archaeology in the Making is a unique document detailing the history of archaeology in second half of the 20th century to the present day through the words of some of its key proponents. It will be invaluable for anybody who wants to understand the theory and practice of this ever developing discipline.