- Here is a general guideline for the discussion this Thursday.
- I am hoping that in the first half of the class, we approach various aspects of "the presence of the past" and various ways through which human groups engaged with the material traces of the past in constructing, maintaining contemporary self-definitions, social/cultural identities, and establishing dialogues with ancestors. Archaeology, as some of the readings argue, is one of such ways of interacting with the past and not the only one. But this issue seems to be crucial for how the discipline of archaeology defines itself and its subject matter. What is the difference between memory and history (discussed somewhere in Schnapp and Alcock in reference to Pierre Nora's work on "sites of memory")?
- Well, in connection with all of this, how do we understand fieldwork, excavation, travel, survey, documentation, imagination, archiving, mapping, as strategies of engaging withy the material aspects of the past. What is a ruin? What do we make of it? What is fieldwork? What are the thinking, working practices of an archaeologist?
- Thirdly, I would like to see us discuss the more recent status of archaeological writing in comparing James Mellaart's discussion of Catalhoyuk (the first major excavator of the site) and Ian Hodder's (the current one). I hope that you will find some intriguing differences in their methodology, their assumptions, their language, their jargon, their use and abuse of theory, their use and abuse of field data. Let us think.
Additional bibliography/further reading for the curious and the ambitious
- Jonker, Gerdien; 1995. The topography of remembrance: The dead, tradition and collective memory in Mesopotamia, E.J.Brill: Leiden.
- Connerton, Paul; 1989. How societies remember. Cambridge University Press.
- Nora, Pierre; 1989. "Between memory and history: Les lieux de memoire," Representations 26: 7-24.