Invention and Reinvention:
Perception in Archaeological Practice
Edited by Donna Yates and Tera C. Pruitt
Read the original call for papers here
Contributors
Introduction by Donna Yates and Tera C. Pruitt
Where is Reflexive Map-Making in Archaeological Research? Towards a Place-Based Approach by James Flexner
Evaluation of a Reflexive Attempt: The Citytunnel Project in Retrospect by Åsa Berggren
Beyond the Viewing Platform: Excavations and Audiences by Gabriel Moshenska
Contextualising Alternative Archaeology: Socio-Politics and Approaches by Tera C. Pruitt
Royal Jelling: Danish National Heritage Reinvented by Mette Bjerrum Jensen
Digital Simulation, Mediating Agents and the Implied Historical Object: Towards an Understanding of Mediaeval Jewellery Objects by David Humphrey
Sights of Invention: Deconstructing Depictions of the Earliest Colonisations of Australia and Oceania in the Academic Archaeological Literature by Sara Perry
Adding a Literary Bent to Historical Archaeology by Laurie A. Wilkie
Twenty-First-Century Reinventions of Alexander, Xerxes and Jaguar Paw: A Critique of Apocalypto and Popular Media Depictions of the Past by Traci Ardren
Text, Narrative, Evidence: Travel Writings and Archaeological Perspectives of Amazonia by Anna T. Browne Ribeiro
Reinventing an Old Discourse: Neolithic Cultural Similarity Across Eurasia by David Steel
Excerpt from Introduction
The title of this volume, Invention and Reinvention, was chosen during the initial call for papers and was intended to be both provocative and abstract. The call drew one of the largest and most diverse responses for abstracts in recent ARC history. Such popularity was no doubt due to a recent trend of academic interest in the imagination, and due to a wider and more sustained postmodern tendency toward reflexivity and subjectivity. We chose the subtitle, Perceptions and Archaeological Practice, after the papers in this volume were selected and ordered. The articles are all organised around themes of perception and self-aware practice in archaeology.
Perhaps inevitably, the compilation and construction of this volume has itself been a self-aware, reflexive process. The final product which you hold in your hands is, as Baxandall (1985) might say, merely a “by-product of activity”, only the final snapshot after a long, involved and negotiated process. This volume has become, in and of itself, a product of invention and reinvention.
In the production stage, in order to help us decide how to arrange papers, we wrote the article titles on small coloured cards. As we moved the cards around, ordering and reordering, vastly different themes emerged. If one title card was placed near another, themes of performance and exhibition were strong and compelling. If these two title cards were pulled further apart and a different one was placed between them, the volume appeared more focused on identity or nationalism. We realised the order we chose for the final volume would alter the overarching message of the text. Our decisions regarding the placement of pieces made a significant difference in what narrative or interpretive statement the volume would offer as a whole.
One of the more interesting effects of this process has been how ‘invention’ and ‘reinvention’ in archaeological practice can be defined by what is included in this volume. The reader will find very little invention in any of these articles. No heritage, no archaeological practice, no material culture or general sense of the past was ever invented in the sense of being created from scratch. Instead, these articles suggest that the past is malleable: that one interpretation or approach is always one step away from another, simply as an alternative perspective. But importantly, this interpretive past is always rooted in tangible or ‘factual’ material.
Tangible, factual entities in archaeological practice manifest as large as monumental pyramids or as small as jewels in a museum display. They are ever-present and ever-grounding entities that work as the links to which diverging theories are tethered. They are the ‘smallest common denominators’ that remain standing after all else has been deconstructed.
Perhaps it is only the respective contexts of these tangible entities which change in meaning. It is only the direction from which a person is standing, and the meanings inherent that person’s own context, that are modified. What is tangible and grounding seems to function as a seed that might grow differently depending on maintenance and context, but which is also an active and independent unit.
The final narrative that has emerged from our own practice is very much about reflexivity in archaeological practice and questioning our own perceptions. We invite you to both engage with our practice as well as to question and rearrange themes in this volume as you might see fit.