Material remains of the past - ruins, fossils, relics, heirlooms - demand explanation in the present. The Past in Things confronts a fundamental question concerning the historical imagination: how do people seek and find their histories in the objects that surround them?
In 2015, our shared desire to recover alternative approaches to the material remains of the past led us to initiate a long-term collaboration, some aspects of which we present on this site. We seek to reconceive the history of archaeology, not as a forwards march of technological prowess and precision, but as a dynamic and ongoing negotiation between very different views of the past in things.
This project cannot be the work of one, two, or three scholars. We have been exceptionally fortunate to draw upon the expertise of dozens of colleagues, within the academy and without. Their diverse approaches to our shared questions have enriched the investigation, and we remain as interested in exploring disagreements as common ground. Nevertheless, our own collaboration remains firmly anchored in a few basic convictions:
- The search for the past in things, if not a human universal, is far more widespread in time and in space than standard histories of archaeology acknowledge.
- The distinction between experts and amateurs is analytically unhelpful, as it obscures both the diversity of socially persuasive expertise, and the dependence of experts upon alternative forms of knowing.
- Typologies of archaeology (colonial, indigenous, etc.), like culturally delimited typologies of antiquarianism (Greek, Aztec, etc.), while heuristically useful, simultaneously obscure intensive dialogue and conflict between notionally discrete traditions.
The Past in Things is an invitation build a new and more capacious history of archaeology on the basis of these principles.
Benjamin Anderson
Felipe Rojas
In 2015, our shared desire to recover alternative approaches to the material remains of the past led us to initiate a long-term collaboration, some aspects of which we present on this site. We seek to reconceive the history of archaeology, not as a forwards march of technological prowess and precision, but as a dynamic and ongoing negotiation between very different views of the past in things.
This project cannot be the work of one, two, or three scholars. We have been exceptionally fortunate to draw upon the expertise of dozens of colleagues, within the academy and without. Their diverse approaches to our shared questions have enriched the investigation, and we remain as interested in exploring disagreements as common ground. Nevertheless, our own collaboration remains firmly anchored in a few basic convictions:
- The search for the past in things, if not a human universal, is far more widespread in time and in space than standard histories of archaeology acknowledge.
- The distinction between experts and amateurs is analytically unhelpful, as it obscures both the diversity of socially persuasive expertise, and the dependence of experts upon alternative forms of knowing.
- Typologies of archaeology (colonial, indigenous, etc.), like culturally delimited typologies of antiquarianism (Greek, Aztec, etc.), while heuristically useful, simultaneously obscure intensive dialogue and conflict between notionally discrete traditions.
The Past in Things is an invitation build a new and more capacious history of archaeology on the basis of these principles.
Benjamin Anderson
Felipe Rojas