Experiencing the Past

I wrote this book while still making my way into archaeology - it brought together what I had been saying with Chris Tilley in the 1980s with a personal vision of what the archaeogical past means to many people now.

As has often been the case with me, the reviews were both vitriolic and condemning (the journal Antiquity refused to review the book and demanded that it be pulped) as well as unreservedly complimentary. Many academics didn't like the personal voice and expression of opinion. Many liked the experiment and risks taken.

Twelve years later it is pleasing to see that much of what I was writing about has come to figure significantly in archaeological thinking . Overall Experiencing the Past was an exploration of the archaeological imagination, as Julian Thomas and I called it at Lempeter, with archaeology a relationship between the remains of the past and present interest.

the book is a kind of analysis of the discourse of archaeology and exemplified an interest in how the past may be written and visualized - imagery, simulation, narrative

it argued for an extension of archaeological interest to include the contemporary world - archaeologies of the contemporary past, with a particular focus upon the convergence of archaeology and contemporary art

in this the book dealt with archaeology's cultural associations with modernity - horror fiction to gardening, forensics to fakery

the cultural politics of archaeology was revealed through a kind of ethnography of archaeology, archaeologists and those with archaeological interests

I argued for a new conception of heritage - not academic disdain for popular interest in the remains of the past, but a celebration of certain kinds of heritage that embody creative relationships with the past

rather than have archaeology only engaged in explaining and interpreting the past, I argued for a post-interpretive turn to take us beyond epistemology into work upon the materiality of the past - ontologies of relationship between past and present

this meant thinking about the materiality of cultural experience and its embodiment - one manifestation of this has been phenomenology in archaeology - a focus on experiences past and present