Actes Sémiotiques (Feb 2022)
Why archaeology today? What archaeology today? . Material traces and absences of the past as cultural signs of the present
Abstract
This paper questions archaeology as a practice that, by unearthing and interpreting the signs of the past, leaves its own traces on the present of a site, a district, a community. Archaeology can be used to do so by different stakeholders, through the creation of discontinuity both in a region’s landscape – i.e. by choosing to attract visitors towards an archaeological site/museum rather than towards others – and in the history of a community – by implicitly (but also explicitly) giving the status of historical apex of a civilization to a specific period/event/monument according to which every other age is adjusted. This creates an unbalanced picture made of centres and peripheries. The few key archaeological ‘centres’ spread around the world and the uncountable neglected ‘peripheries’ that derive from this practice have an impact on our understanding of humanity. Bearing in mind this inevitable capacity of archaeology to leave material and cultural traces on us, this paper asks if and how archaeology can be used to have a positive impact on present societies answering current social questions. Does such practice just generate an indiscriminate accumulation of objects that will never be either studied by specialists or exhibited to the public tending to make museums’ storages collapse? Or does it help local and global communities to reflect upon themselves bearing an historically deeper viewpoint on humanity? Is archaeology used to justify actions taken in the present, to look for signs of prestigious ancestry, or as a medium towards accepting and dignifying otherness? Answers to such questions vary sensibly depending on the semiotic stand that specific archaeologists, as actors within the discipline, take on archaeology as a practice, whether they see it, in synthesis, as a discipline of things or as a discipline of traces. Reflecting on a few case studies such as Koudelka’s “Walking Through Outdoors Ruins” project for Magnum, the archaeology or Bronze Age Sardinia, and the dominant paradigm of communicating archaeology to the public, this paper exposes the social roles that archaeological interpretation has had so far, attempting a prediction of its future paths until some of its possible extreme – Funes el-memorioso driven – consequences.
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