All images courtesy of Elin Andreassen.

The fate of these residues of the recent past typifies a dominant attitude towards things and materiality in western, modern society involving an oppositional hierarchy between, on the one hand, functional and/or aesthetically pleasing things and, on the other, waste – all rubbish supposed to be eradicated by increasingly more effective systems of disposal and recycling (Lucas 2002, Shanks et.al. 2004, Scanlan 2005). Heritage practices may at first be seen to be mediating this opposition, reflecting a care for and attentiveness to the useless and stranded. Heritage, however, contains its own regimes of cultural valuing and othering. In the dominant conception ruins are old, they have an “age-value” which is imperative also to their legal and cultural-historical appreciation. Judged by this criterion, modern ruins become ambiguous, even anachronistic. In their hybrid or uncanny state they become antonyms of the modern and blur established cultural categories of purity and dirt; in short, they become matter out of place – and out of time. Lingering on at the outskirts of society they have become places of abjection, giving face to a past too recent, too grim and repulsive to be embraced as heritage.

There are, however, signs of changing attitudes. The archaeology of the recent or contemporary past has grown fast during the last decade and the field’s “representational archive” has gained an impressive referential mass (e.g. Buchli and Lucas 2001, Olivier 2008, Piccini and Holtorf 2009, Harrison & Schofield, 2010). This development has been concurrent with a broader popular, artistic and scholarly interest in modern ruins in general (Romany 2010, Rowsdower 2011). Some scholars now even speak of a “turn to ruins… that is analogous to the craze for romantic ruins in the Victorian era” (Edensor 2011: 162). Moreover, this development also coincides remarkably with the fate of things in social and cultural research, where a long period of neglect has been claimed superseded by a current “turn to things” (Trentmann 2009, Olsen 2010). How do these twists and turns affect on the way we conceive the ruins of the recent past? To what extent will they change disciplinary perspectives and territories, heritage programs and practices, or ways of mediating and presenting the past? In short, to what extent do they signal a new ecology of practices (Stengers 2005) that significantly alters the way we conceive of materiality, aesthetics and the contemporary past itself?

This book addresses these topics and questions and sets out to accomplish two major goals. The first is to explore how the ruins of modernity are conceived and assigned cultural value in contemporary academic and public discourses. Since their reception is changing this requires two seemingly opposing sets of inquiry. On the one hand, to scrutinize the normative categorization of modern ruins and the discourses and practices that have led to their academic and historical marginalization. Why is it that the ruins of our own time have been so devoid of value – historically, culturally and scientifically – compared to their ancient counterparts? To what extent, for example, does this bias reflect aesthetic preferences that also impinge on their academic and public reception? On the other hand, and conversely, it involves exploring why, how – and to what extent – modern ruins after all this neglect now have reentered social and cultural discourses. Is there really a “turn to ruins”, and if so, why does it take place right now? The second, and most important goal, however, is to reassess the cultural and historical value of modern ruins and to suggest possible means for reaffirming their cultural and historic significance. Crucial for this reassessment is a concern with decay and ruination, and with the role things play in expressing the neglected, unsuccessful and ineffable. Abandonment and ruination is usually understood negatively through the tropes of loss and deprivation; things are degraded and humiliated while the information, knowledge and memory embedded in them become lost along the way. Without at all ignoring its many negative and traumatizing aspects, a main question addressed in this book is whether ruination also can be seen as an act of disclosure? If ruination disturbs the routinized and ready-to-hand, as convincingly argued by Tim Edensor (2005), to what extent can it also be seen as a recovery of memory (DeSilvey 2006), as exposing meanings and presences that perhaps are only possible to grasp at second hand when no longer immersed in their withdrawn and useful reality?

While we have seen an immense increase in the literature on modern ruins, much of this is concerned with discourses about and representations of ruins rather than direct engagements with them. Thus, there is today available an array of books and papers exploring the ruin themes in literature, philosophy, films, visual arts, etc (e.g. Yablon 2009, Hell and Schönle 2010, Dale and Burell 2011). Another prominent trope is what may be termed a new “ruin aesthetics”, especially as manifested in the fast growing number of photographic works expressing the nostalgia and entropy associated with decay and abandonment (e.g. Romany 2010). In addition, the more or less non-academic – and self-declared democratic – urban explorer community has been a driving force in making modern ruins an issue in popular culture (Ninjalicious/Chapman 2005, Rowsdower 2011).

These approaches are in their own respects all valuable contributions that enrich our understanding of modern ruins and create a public awareness about them. This book, however, takes a different position. While acknowledging and using the immensely important contributions from philosophers and theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel and others, it brings about a new confidence in and concern with the material itself. Moreover, while inter-disciplinary in scope and acknowledging the profound contributions to this field made by geographers, historians, anthropologists – and urban explorers, an archaeological sensibility permeates the book, not only as reflected in the numerous case studies presented, but also in its general orientation and take on things.

At the same time the book also positions itself in relation to the emerging field of contemporary archaeology. An underlying justifying subtext in most archaeological discourses on the recent past is its multi-vocal and democratic nature, and its ability to give voice to social groups and people that would generally not be heard or engaged in traditional historical narration (cf. e.g. Buchli and Lucas 2001, Harrison & Schofield 2010, Olivier 2001). That is, its ability to produce other histories and inform alternative human pasts. Clearly, history is constantly constructed; constantly debated, contested, altered or reaffirmed. There is a danger, however, that even critical approaches reproduce the same plots, continue weaving new threads into the same old garment. While there are a number of good reasons, politically as well as ethically, to sympathize with the human emancipating perspective dominating the archaeology of the contemporary past, it still tends to assign things and ruins an essentially derivative or epiphenomenal being. Despite the many democratic pleas for the marginal and othered, things seem in no need of care or emancipation and continue to be regarded primarily as means to reach something else and presumably more important: neglected cultures and deprived human agents behind the redundant artifacts.

What this book emphasizes is not only that things are inextricable parts of the wished for “social”, being indispensable constituents of the very social fabric they are reduced to witnesses of, but that they are of interest in their own respect; that they have an “integrity” of their own (Olsen 2010). They make a difference to the world and to other beings and thus are “capable of an effect, of inflicting some kind of blow on reality” (Harman 2002: 21). This, moreover, causes a concern with how things exist, act and inflict on each other, also outside the human realm. And ruins provide an exemplary heuristic case in this respect. In their own withering and crumbling, where nature intrudes and mingles, they make manifest their own ruin ecologies, also blurring the previously clear distinction between the man-made and the natural (cf. Edensor 2005).

Acknowledging things’ integrity and otherness, and thus crediting them at least a partial autonomy, has several consequences for how the ruins of modernity are approached in this volume. Instead of domesticating them within the tropes of conventional historical narration, the book examines ways of embracing them in their unfamiliar “unuseful” state. This allows for three closely related “ruin effects” that will be explored in this volume. Firstly, modern ruins challenge conventional historical reconstructions and conceptions of the past. In their unstructured and fragmented state of accumulation these stranded materials object to both modernity and historicism’s wished-for ideal of completeness, order, and purified time. By stubbornly being (t)here they openly rebuke the conception of history as sequenced, biographical and progressive. In their very own positivistic manner they show that history is not a projected stream leaving the past behind, but that it bends and twists in a disorderly manner, interrupting the expectations of the have been and the becoming. Secondly, they carry the potential of fuelling a critical discourse on modern aesthetics. Through their difference, their disgraceful alteration and disintegration, they oppose and provide a contrast to the ideal of seamlessness and tactile sterility, the taken-for-granted aesthetic conventions of purity and order. Thirdly, they provoke an ontological and ethical rethinking of heritage. According to the dominant conception of cultural heritage the things of the past are primarily of value if they are somehow put into use, to serve as vehicles for defining identity, to attract tourists, inspire contemplation, etc. Things are little but things-for-us, reduced to what Heidegger termed Bestand, by which their manipulative being as “standing reserves” for us is all that remains (Heidegger 1993, Introna 2009, cf. Olsen 2010: 82). Perhaps the most radical implication of the position explored in this book is that things and ruins are also valuable in and of themselves. Being attentive to and respecting their integrity and otherness also involves acknowledging their right not to be meaningful in the dominant interpretative sense, where meaning has always been confused with socially derivative meanings, a signification always originating from somewhere else. A major challenge posed by this book is precisely the acceptance of the possibility that things themselves may be the source of their own signification (cf. Benso 2000: xxvii, Bennett 2010: 108).

Outline:

Apart from a general introduction, and an epilogue, the book will be divided into six sections. The first section will contain papers that outline the conceptual and theoretical terrain and discuss why modern ruins now seem to have caught the interest of so many artist, scholars and enthusiasts. The next four sections will focus on topics central to the debates of modern ruins and research within the archaeology of the recent past; ruin-heritage, memory-materiality, aesthetics-attraction, and abandonment-agency. While these sections also include research from a number of case studies, the sixth section will entirely be based on a number of novel case studies conducted as parts of the international research project Ruin Memories (see www.ruinmemories.org). Each section will consist of three to five papers, which including the (short) general introduction and the epilogue add to a total of 26 papers in this volume.

1. Ruins – concepts, theories and attitudes

Ruin is a contested and ambiguous word. In our everyday conception it easily brings to mind ancient and enchanted monumental structures, an archaeological dream world featuring celebrities such as Machu Picchu, Pompeii and Angkor Wat. For centuries classical and Gothic ruins also inspired poets, artists and scholars, motivated philosophical mediations and served as instruments of contemplative and aesthetic pleasure. At the same time, the word ruin has a strong negative tone to it. According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, “To ruin is to inflict or bring great and irretrievable disaster upon, to destroy agency, to reduce to a state of poverty, to demoralize completely” (1964: 1095). In this active verb form it is almost entirely associated with negative and violent processes, with destruction and demolition.

While the way we think of ancient ruins is hardly affected by these not so pleasing processual connotations, they seem to have overdetermined our conception of the residues of the modern. At the same time it is precisely these destructive aspects which theorists such as Walter Benjamin have emphasized as productive and revealing, as well as providing a more realistic picture of history than the conventional linear narratives. Ruins, he asserts, object to historicism’s image of history as harmonious and continuous. Their destructive character makes manifest the “at once scattered and preserved”; in the ruin all the forces and interests of history enter on a reduced scale and take the form of a “petrified unrest” (Benjamin 2003: 169).

These different, ambiguous and conflicting conceptions permeate the wide range of discourses and artistic expressions that for centuries have been concerned with ruins and ruination. Today they are accentuated, modified and rearticulated in the engagements and discourses brought about by the increased interests in modern ruins.

In this first section scholars from different disciplines explore the conceptual and theoretical terrain of ruins and ruination, and more generally the different attitudes to contemporary thing-worlds. The section will also investigate the new interests in modern ruins as a cultural and academic phenomenon and scrutinize it not only in relation to current trends but also in terms of what the ruins themselves afford.

2. Modern ruins and heritage

Heritage management and practices may at first be seen to be mediating the prevailing oppositional hierarchy between, on the one hand, functional and/or aesthetically pleasing things, and, on the other, waste – the useless and stranded. Heritage, however, contains its own regimes of cultural valuing and othering, including a regime of aesthetic preferences. The ancient and unquestioned “heritage ruin”, provides visitors with a disciplined, picturesque space where all extraneous material and pollutants are expunged (Edensor 2005). Seemingly frozen in time, further decay is staved off through restoration and preservation. Arresting decay and ruination, of course, has always been the imperative of modern museums and heritage management. Modern ruins, in contrast, are “untimely” ruins (Yablon 2009). Being “too young and too fast” they materialize a “petrified unrest” that is difficult to handle and tame. Modern ruins are withering and crumbling, they decompose and rot, invite gulls, insects, rats, fungus, scrubs and trees to premises formerly reserved for humans. By generously affording uncanny reminders of ambiguity, death, and decay, their very presence becomes conspicuously at odds with the common cultural tropes of purity, sustainability and conservation (Lucas 2002, Shanks et.al. 2004). However, precisely through their state of transformation and unrest these ruins may be seen as uttering their own resistance and cultural critique. Thus, how can an archaeological/academic engagement with modern ruins challenge the politics and aesthetics of heritage and materiality? Do the recent claims of a “thing agency” (Gell 1998, Latour 2005) extend to the aesthetic field as well?

The ability to give voice to groups and people generally not heard or engaged in traditional historical narration (cf. e.g. Buchli & Lucas 2001, Harrison & Schofield 2010, Olivier 2008), and to produce other histories and inform alternative human pasts, appears as a justifying subtext in most archaeological discourses on the recent past. A similar humane perspective dominates the general archaeological codes of ethics, as well as the ethics/politics of heritage acts and resource management. Cultural heritage is our responsibility and our concerns are mostly dictated by human relevance. Loss of heritage is seen as a loss of roots and self; hence, heritage must be stewarded and conserved to secure the identity and well-being of the subjects involved (Rowlands 2002). Without dismissing these ethical concerns the papers in this section will also reclaim an archaeological ethical stand where the true subjects of inquiry are objects, and discuss how an engagement with modern ruins may alter heritage hierarchies and politics. How can these “missing masses of morality” (Latour 2002) be of significance, not only as concerned with our appeal or demand, but also in their sometimes less useful otherness (cf. Benso 2000)?

3. Material memory

In cultural and social studies much attention has been devoted to how memory crystallizes into sites or places of memory, locales of collective remembering (Nora 1984, Assman 1992). Memory is here associated with a “re-collective” conception, in other words, with memory as a conscious and willful human process of recalling the past. The materiality of the place is not decisive; the crucial issue is the past event and the will to remember it through subsequent site embodiments (monuments, memorials, etc). This book, however, is mostly concerned with different kinds of sites, which might be called “places of abjection”—“a no-man’s land too recent, conflicting and repulsive to be shaped as collective memory” (Gonzáles-Ruibal 2008: 256). Such places still contain the material causation for their abjection, and are haunted by a present past too grim or uncanny to be embraced. There is, of course, no ontological stability to such places. As also addressed in this book new historical circumstances and public attention might transform places of abjection into sites of commemoration and collective memory.

Places of abjection also relate materially (although ambiguously so) to another type of memory, a habit memory. While re-collective memory implies a conscious gaze directed towards a particular past, habit memory is an implicit act of re-membering embedded in our bodily routines and ways of dealing with things: “it no longer represents our past to us, it acts it” (Bergson 2004: 93). In Bergson’s formative conception, habit memory was largely a function of adaptive value: only those aspects of the past that are useful or compatible with our present conducts are habitually remembered. As the papers in this section explore, modern ruins were once useful, and thus embedded in repetitious practice and infused with habit memory. When discarded and outmoded, their habitual mnemonic significance is lost while their physical presence, albeit ruined, continues. As such they survive and gather as the material antonyms to the habitually useful, creating a tension-filled constellation that carries the potential of triggering a particular kind of involuntary memory (Benjamin 1999). Contributions in this section will explore how, by reverberating against the taken-for-granted materiality of habit memory, these ruins may become potential agents of disruption and “actualisation” which bring forth the abject memories that both the recollective and the habitual have displaced.

4. Aesthetics, art, attraction

Emphasizing the cultural and aesthetic critique driven by ruins of the modern is importantly not a quest to their romantization, domestication, or inclusion in traditional conceptions of heritage-politics or aesthetics. It is rather a quest that seeks to value them for what they are and take seriously the abject tensions they evoke. Such tensions, as for example provoked by their rebuking of the tactile sterility of the smooth and increasingly regulated urban spaces, are a crucial aspect of their critical potential (Edensor 2005, Dawdy 2010); a ruin lesson which also is about the mockery of human pretentions. Contributions to this section are, thus, rather directed towards “…the politics animated, to the common sense they disturb, to the critiques condensed or disallowed, and to the social relations avidly coalesced or shattered around them” (Stoler 2008: 196). In short to all the processes modern ruins manifest through their presence and transformation.

A common concern is also how to mediate the material utterances and effects made by these modern ruins. How do we convey these site-specific experiences into our own media, discourses and expressions? Traditional means of archaeological documentation; drawings, plans, distribution maps, graphs, site- and artifact photos, may have an extraordinary power when applied to the recent past. By making the recent archaeological, and thereby allowing for a critical distancing or Verstörung, these means can help to display and actualize that past in challenging ways. In addition, the growing field of interaction between archaeology and visual art suggests new ways of mediating our material encounters with the recent past. Of particular interest here is photography (Shanks 1997, Andreassen et.al. 2010, Crang 2010), partly because it transcends the boundaries between documentation and art but also because it promises to do more justice to the “physiognomy” of things than conventional narratives seem to do. Moreover, photography is promising also as a possible means of mediating or re-actualizing material “presence effects”, bringing forth the ephemeral simultaneities between presence and meaning (cf. Gumbrecht 2004) that often characterize our material encounters.

Therefore, and corresponding to the recent and concurrent development of interest in modern ruins within artistic and scholarly disciplines, chapters in this section will explore not only how the “turn to things” signals new ecologies of practice and conception, but also how that could be encouraged through the joint effort/perspectives of art-academia. And, as follows, how ruins of the modern are themselves encouraging such joint efforts, by transgressing or blurring disciplinary boundaries.

5. Abandonment

Archaeology as a discipline has long been defined by its temporal detachment from its subject matter. Archaeologists study phenomena that are final, over and gone and not processes that are here and now or ongoing. Abandonment, therefore, has been a central theme, while at the same time an unquestioned given, in archaeological research. The development of archaeology of the recent and contemporary past, of the here and now, does naturally challenge this conception. So has also the lately growing emphasis on biographical approaches in archaeological and material culture research. Such biographical approaches have, however, mostly been restricted to histories of use and hence not directly applied to challenge conceptions of abandonment as such.

To abandon or abandonment, according to the Oxford Dictionary, is “to go away” without intention of returning, “to withdraw” or “to stop”. Abandonment, thus, is final and marks the end of a process – and not the beginning of one. Similarly, in archaeology it represents a termination – and a moment of disinterest, which is ironic because it is generally at this moment of abandonment that a site becomes archaeologically interesting. Although common to all ruins, modern ruins visibly oppose to this static conception of abandonment. When the modern capitalist vitality abandons a building it is not simply written out of the social system, left in the past as the narrative progresses. The building lingers on and is in a way “returned” to unprescribed activities – both of its own as well as of the public’s (Dawdy 2010). It is, at least temporarily, turned into a democratic space of common access – a place, or an “inside”, for activities pressed to the outskirts of the social order; a heterotopia enabling opportunities for alternative modes of life. The papers in this section will address the question, and ambiguity it indicates, of whether, and to what extent modern ruins can be thought of as re-establishing or maintaining social order, while at the same time manifesting a cultural critique of the same?

Modern ruins are also in a “fluid state of material becoming” (Edensor 2005: 16). They are constantly changing in appearance and mood through the seasonal shifts and their own ruination. In their case abandonment is quite clearly not something momentary but a phase or an ongoing process – a ruin in making. How does this immediate dynamic and transforming character challenge not only our conceptions of ruin or abandonment but also our methods of inference? And how does an engagement with this ongoing biography, or auto-biography in writing, affect the stories we tell.

6. Archaeologies of the recent past

This last section will contain contributions from novel case studies carried out as part of the international and multi-disciplinary Ruin Memories project. These studies are conducted in a number of countries and cover a wide range of sites and topics, such as industrial ruins of Iceland; the materiality of the Spanish Civil War and Franco dictatorship; derelict mining landscapes and settlements in Montana, USA; the archaeology of the Third Reich harvest festival in Bückeberg, Germany, and a prisoner of war camp in Arctic Norway. Naturally, these studies engage with the themes explored in the previous sections (memory, heritage, aesthetics and abandonment), but also provide new arguments and detailed accounts of how a material and archaeological approach contributes to an enriched understanding of these “moments” of the recent past. By still being present, sites, things and ruins carry the potential of disclosing crucial and often neglected aspects of these pasts. Through their direct and habitual involvement in them, these surviving constituents afford a more immediate and committed re-membering than most historical accounts allow for. Far from involving any neglect of the profound importance of such textual and oral accounts, what these studies amount to is rather to provide convincing cases for how an archaeology of the recent past can add nuances, differences and novelties to this past as well as inspire alternative modes of historical engagement.

References:

Andreassen, E., Bjerck, H.B. and Olsen, B. (2010) Persistent memories: Pyramiden – a Soviet mining town in the High Arctic. Trondheim: Tapir Academic Press.

Assmann, J. (1992) Das Kulturelle Gedächtniss. Munich: C. H. Beck.

Benjamin, W. (1999) The arcaedes project. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Benjamin, W. (2003) Selected writings, volume 4: 1938–1940. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press.

Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham: Duke University Press.

Benso, S. (2000) The face of things: A different side of ethics. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Bergson, H. (2004) Matter and memory. Dover philosophical classics. New York: Courier Dover Publications.

Buchli, V. and Lucas, G. (2001) Archaeologies of the contemporary past. London and New York: Routledge.

Concise Oxford Dictionary (1964). H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler (eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Crang, M. (2010) The death of great ships: photography, politics, and waste
in the global imaginary. Environment and Planning A, 42, pp. 1084-1102.

Edensor, T. (2005) Industrial ruins: Space, aesthetics and materiality. Oxford: Berg.

Edensor, T. (2011) Comments to G. Gordillo: Ships stranded in the forest. Current Anthropology 52:2, pp. 161-162.

Dale, K. and Burrell, G. (2011) Disturbing structure, reading the ruins. Culture and Organization, 17:2, pp. 107-121.

Dawdy, S.L. (2010) Clockpunk anthropology and the ruins of modernity. Current Anthropology, 51:6, pp. 761-793.

DeSilvey, C. (2006) Observed decay: Telling stories with mutable things. Journal of Material Culture, 11:3, pp. 318-338.

Gell, A. (1998) Art and agency: An anthropological theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

González-Ruibal, A. (2006) The dream of reason: An archaeology of the failures of modernity in Ethiopia. Journal of Social Archaeology, 6, pp. 175-201.

González-Ruibal, A. (2008) Time to destroy: An archaeology of supermodernity. Current Anthropology, 49:2 (april 2008), pp. 247-279.

Gumbrecht, H.U. (2004) Production of presence: What meaning cannot convey. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Harman, G. (2002) Tool-being: Heidegger and the metaphysics of objects. Chicago: Open Court.

Harrison, R. and Schofield, J. (2010) After modernity: Archaeological approaches to the contemporary past. New York: Oxford University Press.

Heidegger, M. (1993) The question concerning technology. D. Farell Krell (ed.) Martin Heidegger: Basic writings. San Francisco: Harper Collins.

Hell, J. and Schönle, A. (2010) Ruins of modernity. Durham NC: Duke University Press.

Holtorf, C. and Piccini, A. (2009) Contemporary archaeologies: Excavating now. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

Introna, L.D. (2009) Ethics and the speaking if things. Theory, Culture & Society, 26:4, pp. 398-419.

Latour, B. (2002) Morality and technology: The end of the means. Theory, Culture & Society, 19:5/6, pp. 247-260.

Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lucas, G. (2002) Disposability and dispossession in the twentieth century. Journal of material culture, 7, pp. 5-22.

Ninjalicious (aka Jeff Chapman) (2005) Access all areas: A user’s guide to the art of urban exploration. Toronto: Infilpress.

Nora, P. (1984) Entre mémoire et histoire: La problématique des lieux. In Les lieux de mémoire, Vol. 1, La République, Pierre Nora (ed.), xv-xlii. Paris: Gallimard.

Olivier, L. (2001) Duration, memory and the nature of the archaeological record. H. Karlson (ed.) It’s about time: The concept of time in archaeology. Gothenburgh: Bricoleur Press.

Olivier, L. (2008) Le sombre abîme du temps. Mémoire et archéologie. Paris: Seuil.

Olsen, B. (2010) In defense of things: Archaeology and the ontology of objects. Lanham: Alta Mira Press.

Romany, W.G. (2010) Beauty in decay: The art of urban exploration. Berkeley: Ginko Press.

Rowlands, M. (2002) The power of origins: Questions of cultural rights. V. Buchli (ed.) The material culture reader. Oxford: Berg.

Rowsdower, Z. (2011) Fresh rot: Urban exploration and the preservation of decay. Manitoba Anthropology. Journal of the Manitoba Anthropology Student’s Association, 29, pp. 1-15.

Scanlan, J. (2005) On garbage. London: Reaktion Books.

Shanks, M. (1997) Photography and archaeology. B. Leigh Molyneaux (ed.)The cultural life of images: Visual representations in archaeology. London: Routledge.

Shanks, M., Platt, D. and Rathje, W.L. (2004) The perfume of garbage. Modernity/Modernism, 11:1, pp. 68-83.

Stengers, I. (2005) Introductory notes on an ecology of practices. Cultural Studies Review, 11(1), pp. 183-196.

Stoler, A.L. (2008) Imperial debris: Reflections on ruins and ruination. Cultural Anthropology, 23:2, pp. 191-219.

Trentmann, F. (2009) Materiality in the Future of History: Things, Practices and Politics. Journal of British Studies, 48:2, pp. 283-307.

Yablon, N. (2009) Untimely ruins: An archaeology of American urban modernity, 1819-1919. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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You also need to do your own booking at the St. Michael hotel.The discounted room rate is £69, and I ask people to book their room at their website, quoting CBK “ruin memories” (important!). They will hold rooms for us until October 1. Breakfast, lunch, tea/coffee, etc will all be served at the hotel during the workshop.

Details as to programme to follow; presentation/discussion of fieldwork done this year will be central to the workshop.