Archaeology and Museology constantly balance their emancipatory potential against their legacies as colonial controlling processes. Do archaeology and museums occupy a key space in contemporary identity formation? Are they not just part of the modern state’s inventory of attributes rather than public ‘contact zones’? Museums’ attempt to re-invent themselves as socially engaged places of memory are hindered by an embedded desire to catalogue, conserve and display objects and we must ask “why conserve?” Many of the peoples whose objects are collected and displayed believe in an encultured world in which the decay and death of people, objects, places and time was and remains expected. We need to consider how objects work and what their rights might be. Objects, places and people have typically ‘messy’ biographies that offer points of attachment for a wide range of sensory engagement. Archaeology’s two strengths materiality and context can productively expose significant ruptures in master narratives through archaeologies of archive that ask how objects come to be collected and displayed (or not) and at what cost. This wider understanding of the archive as multi-temporal and multi-sensorial can show how decay and history intersect with personhood, place and politics, demonstrating the Beauty of letting go…

paper given at Archaeologies of Media and Film conference, University of Bradford / National Media Museum, 4 September 2014

Communicating Archaeology, 2017

This chapter is intended to provide readers with an overview of the key contemporary principles, practices, and debates relating to museum archaeology. By highlighting a series of questions, it encourages readers to adopt a critical perspective and to use this in their own evaluations of museum theory and work. And, by referring to a significant sample of the professional and academic literature on museum archaeology, it offers not only an introduction to the chapters selected for inclusion in this Reader but also the chance to explore an even wider body of relevant literature. The focus in this introduction, and throughout the Reader, is on present-day museum archaeology, including its development since the 1970s. Over this period, there has been a clear shift in museums from servicing the needs of archaeologists to serving diverse publics in more dynamic and sustainable ways. There exists, however, an extensive literature on the earlier history of antiquarian and archaeological collecting, dedicated to themes ranging from colonialism and nationalism to classical art and aesthetics (e.g.

Annual Review of Anthropology, 2010

From their beginnings, archaeology museums have reflected a complex and dynamic balance between the demands of developing, documenting, and preserving objects on the one hand and sharing knowledge, access, and control on the other. This balance has informed and inflected the ways that museums present the past, including both practical aspects of pedagogy and exhibition design as well as more critical and contested issues of authority, authenticity, and reflexivity in interpretation. Meeting the complex requirements of curation, deliberate collections growth, management, and conservation, as well as the need to respond to continuing challenges to the museum's right and title to hold various forms of cultural property, archaeological museums play an active role in both preserving and shaping the public's view of the past and reflect the prospects and perils of being at once a temple to the muses and a forum for sometimes contentious public discourse.

Curator: The Museum Journal, 2012

Among the major domains studied in the history of archaeology are museums, as institutions and as sites of knowledge. In this chapter, we consider how museums have contributed to the making of archaeological knowledge-such as the National Museum of Denmark's Three Age System, or notions of prehistoric industries at the 1867 Universal Exhibition. Another example concerns fakesestablishing the authenticity of artefacts has led to an understanding of their mode of production and use, while questions of provenance have broadened to issues of assemblage and context. The second part of this chapter considers how the history of archaeology has been mobilized as a means of outreach and education, with examples drawn from Northern Italy, Oxford, Paris, and Berlin. We conclude that museums nowadays cannot ful l their functions without some consciousness of their history, and therefore should integrate the material and ideological conditions of archaeological knowledge into their objectives and displays.

2018

This monograph is dedicated to an area of knowledge that in the English-speaking and Central European, and increasingly in the Spanish-speaking world, has long been attracting great interest. We are referring to what is known as Media Archaeology, an area in which the clear and fertile resonance of the term with Michel Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge is evident, but which exceeds and extends the scope of the latter along other unprecedented paths, to explore its own becoming creation. Our interest, a priori, is not to defend a firm academic position, in a sense of pure praxis and conceptual comfort, but rather to collect a series of theoretical (and to a certain extent epistemological and methodological) approaches in a set of discourses and practices linked to the media deployed over time. Media Archaeology brings together common interests that have been developing for decades from various foci and authors, ranging from visual studies, cultural history and film studies, to medi...

World Archaeology, 2018

A number of recent publications, including a recent special issue of World Archaeology, have engaged with museum collections as assemblages that can be studied in their own right. This paper attempts to refigure 'collection' and 'assemblage' as action nouns, in order to explore the role these processes can have in generating understandings of the past, especially within museum settings. While nineteenth-century projects involving collecting and assemblage contributed fundamental disciplinary frameworks to archaeology, museums have increasingly been regarded as institutions exclusively focused on the archival storage of excavated material, and the display of archaeological knowledge generated through fieldwork. This paper makes the case that a creative and reflective reengagement with collection, as a process of assemblage and reassemblage, including in forms made possible by electronic media, has the potential to refresh museum archaeology for the twentyfirst century, realigning it with other archaeological practices.

2011