杏吧原创

CAN we predict what aspects of today鈥檚 consumer-driven and politically
troubled global economy might interest archaeologists as little as 10 years from
now? We can鈥檛 be sure, but there are fascinating and disturbing clues in this
bunch of books.

Archaeology is largely the study of past material culture. It has always been
multidisciplinary, embracing geology, anthropology and history, but boundaries
are now blurring as never before to show how our contemporary views of the world
shape the complex nature of the past. Archaeology is a political and a
scientific project, drawing on cultural identity, ethnicity and religion. So
from Stonehenge to Bosnia and beyond, there is no single, stable 鈥減ast鈥�, only a
multiplicity of possibilities.

Three trends stand out. The first concerns the ever widening remit of
archaeology to add previously unrecognised areas for research. Even
well-established new disciplines such as industrial archaeology appear
inadequate, anchored as they are to mainly pre-20th-century topics. What鈥檚
driving change so forcefully is the realisation that mass industrialisation,
particularly of globalised warfare, has left a unique archaeological record of
the 20th century, such as, the battlefields and souvenirs of the First World
War.

As Dangerous Energy by Wayne Cocroft shows, there are extraordinary
architectural and associated remains of armaments production in Britain. The
palimpsest of landscaped factory sites such as Waltham Abbey in Essex and traces
of the 1930s re-armament programme show an unexpected perspective on the past
century.

As the way in which we look at the recent past changes, new approaches
appear. Take Michael Stratton鈥檚 and Barrie Trinder鈥檚 Twentieth Century
Industrial Archaeology. Rather than using traditional industrial
archaeology to chart changing forms of airports and shipbuilding, they
concentrate on changes in culture and technology, persuading us to rethink the
civilian legacy of two world wars.

Such boundary-pushing studies fit well with anthropological approaches to
landscape in Contested Landscapes, edited by Barbara Bender and Margot
Winer. They show that human activities shaped landscapes, and these in turn
shape people鈥檚 relationships with the material worlds they have created.

A second, equally important development is the identification of new levels of
archaeological inquiry. One of the most promising is explored in The
Archaeology of Communities, edited by Marcello Canuto and Jason Yaeger.
This innovative book explores the yawning gap between two established approaches
to ancient cultures seen either as empires or, more recently, as households.
They dissect this notion of community hitherto seen as an obvious and socially
coherent 鈥済iven鈥濃�擜ztec empire or Maya city鈥攁nd instead use
鈥渉ousehold鈥� as a dynamic abstraction to explore and interpret variations in
material culture and social activities.

The third鈥攁nd most contentious鈥� development involves a
provocative attempt to redefine the nature of archaeology. In Archaeologies
of the Contemporary Past, Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas see archaeology as
part of a broader anthropological assessment of material culture. Archaeology
becomes a unique way of examining relationships between people and objects of
any time or culture, rather than simply looking at the past. The 鈥渁rchaeology of
us鈥� moves beyond the powerful but limited practice of ethnoarchaeology, which
offers modern ethnographic analogies to throw light on similar prehistoric
practices, so elegantly presented in Ethnoarchaeology in Action by
Nicholas David and Carol Kramer.

By coining the term 鈥渃ontemporary past鈥�, Buchli and Lucas have captured the
moment. They examine the archaeology of present societies. Their case studies of
the archaeologies of a council house, a crashed Second World War bomber and
strike-breaking in the US force us to think in strange and unfamiliar ways, even
to consider the archaeological possibilities of events that haven鈥檛 yet taken
place.