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Archaeological intervention in the past, present and future tense

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2011

William Rathje
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Extract

I was trained as a processual archaeologist in the 1960s, and as a result my interests and research, along with the vocabulary I have used to express these, have followed a different trajectory from those paths that have emerged out of what we once called postprocessual archaeology. This is not to say that we do not have common beacons. I believe we certainly do. To this end, I am writing this dialogue with Harrison's piece to rename the ‘archaeology of the contemporary past’ as ‘archaeology in and of the present’ and ‘for the future’. I like the new name for contemporary past archaeology, but archaeologists in and of the present should not forget about their own past.

Type
Discussion
Information
Archaeological Dialogues , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , December 2011 , pp. 176 - 180
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

Notes

1 As one small example concerning intellectual genealogy, which Harrison tends to blur in his article, when I came to teach at the University of Arizona in 1971, Michael Schiffer was a graduate student focused on the archaeology of the past. I asked students to study the relation between attitudes, behaviour and material culture in contemporary Tucson, so they could understand how archaeology works in describing a familiar contemporary society. I involved them in the founding of the Garbage Project in 1973 for the same reason. My friend Michael started his first study of the present a few years later (Schiffer, Downing and McCarthy 1981) and has continued to make major contributions ever since (see, for example, Schiffer 1991; 1992; and Schiffer, Butts and Grimm 1994).

2 A list of Garbage Project research and results – analyses, grants, publications, technical reports, testimony, talks and teaching and media exposures – can be viewed online as CV’06 WLR.doc at http://humanitieslab.stanford.edu/GarbologyOnline/home.

3 In our attempts at public interventions, we have been reported on every national US television news programme, on 106 local television news programmes, on national news documentaries and in national print media.