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    Archaeologies of the contemporary world

    Harrison, R. and Breithoff, Esther (2017) Archaeologies of the contemporary world. Annual Review of Anthropology 46 (1), pp. 203-221. ISSN 0084-6570.

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    Abstract

    Archaeologists have long been interested in contemporary material culture, but only recently has a dedicated subfield of archaeology of the contemporary world begun to emerge. Although it is concerned mainly with the archaeology of the early to mid-twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in its explicit acknowledgment of the contemporary archaeological record as multi-temporal, the subfield is not defined by a focus on a specific time period so much as a particular disposition toward time, material things, the archaeological process, and its politics. This article considers how the subfield might be characterized by its approaches to particular sources and its current and emerging thematic foci. A significant point of debate concerns the role of archaeology as a discipline through which to explore ongoing, contemporary sociomaterial practices—is archaeology purely concerned with the abandoned and the ruined, or can it also provide a means by which to engage with and illuminate ongoing, contemporary, and future sociomaterial practices?

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): archaeologies of the contemporary world, ethnoarchaeology, archaeological ethnography, modern material culture studies, multitemporality, future worlds
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Historical Studies
    Depositing User: Esther Breithoff
    Date Deposited: 08 Oct 2020 09:57
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 18:04
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/40936

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