Undoing Things explores all the ways in which things become undone, be they objects, bodies, places, or worlds.
Undoing Things explores all the ways in which things become undone, be they objects, bodies, places, or worlds.
Although archaeologists have long attended to the productive dimensions of materiality and material culture as a coherent phenomenonmaking objects, building things, constructing identitiesthe discourse around undoing is more fragmented. Topics such as ruination, death, decay, demolition, and collapse are usually examined separately. Undoing Things asks what connections or continuities can be discerned in a diverse range of practices, both intentional and taphonomic, both destructive and healing. Is there a creative component to undoing? How visible are different processes of undoing? How is time implicated? Is undoing reversible? Who has the power to undo and when is undoing empowering? What does it take to undo knowledge? These and other questions are examined through archaeological studies ranging from classical Maya and colonial Caribbean examples to present-day Liberia, historical and ethnographic approaches to present-day Argentina, and the contemporary art world.
In the first quarter of the 21st century, human worlds have experienced a series of ruptures from climate-related disasters, political violence, and the Covid-19 pandemic. Undoing Things helps move us beyond a cloud of chaos with a deeper understanding of how and why things fall apart and is vital reading for archaeologists and those in related disciplines.
List of Figures;List of Tables; List of Contributors;
Chapter
1.
Introduction; Section
1. Undoing Objects:
Chapter
2. Decomposition: Book
History Beyond the Book;
Chapter
3. Letting be(come): Undoings at the Museum;
Chapter
4. Precarious Heritage and Weak Artifacts: the Doing and Undoing of
the Polish Womens Strike;
Chapter
5. Undoing and Entropy in the
Archaeological Record;
Chapter
6. The Doing in Undoing; Section
2. Undoing
Bodies:
Chapter
7. Undoing Animals among the Classic Maya: Turtles, Deer and
Monkeys;
Chapter
8. How to Assemble a Cross-Species History. Herders, Dams,
Animal Younglings, and the Substance of Milk;
Chapter
9. Undoing Animals and
the Consequences; Abattoirs and Other Sources of Waste in 18th-and
19th-Century New Orleans;
Chapter
10. Undoing African American Human Remains;
Section
3. Undoing Places:
Chapter
11. Revenant Landscapes: Toxic Industrial
Waste and the Archaeology of Slow Violence;
Chapter
12. Geographies of
Undoing;
Chapter
13. Places Undone by Terrain;
Chapter
14. Before and after
the Flood: Archaeological Sites and the Exploitation of Rivers in Northern
Sweden;
Chapter
15. The Politics of Precarity and the Undoing of Agricultural
Expansion on the Medieval Deccan, Southern India; Section
4. Undoing Worlds:
Chapter
16. Settler Ontocide;
Chapter
17. Recalcitrant Data and the Concept
of Decline in the Archaeology of Plantation Sites;
Chapter
18. Death and the
Maiden Scars and the Mnemonics of Ruination;
Chapter
19. Archaeologies of
Black Futurity: Sketches of Liberias Monuments and Ruins;
Chapter
20.
Contemporary Doomsday Devices and the Undoing of End-Times; Index.
Gavin Lucas is a Professor of Archaeology at the University of Iceland. He has had an enduring interest in the way archaeologists think and work, reflected in various books such as Critical Approaches to Fieldwork (2001), Understanding the Archaeological Record (2012), Writing the Past (2021), and Archaeological Situations (2022). Alongside this has been a recurrent interest in the concept of time: The Archaeology of Time (2005), Making Time (2020), and with Laurent Olivier, Conversations on Time (2021) while his main focus of fieldwork has been on the archaeology of the last 500 years.
Shannon Lee Dawdy is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Dawdys fieldwork combines archival, ethnographic, and archaeological methods. Her work has focused on the history of colonialism and capitalism, human-material relations, temporality, and the archaeology of contemporary life. Her books include Building the Devils Empire: French Colonial New Orleans (2008), Patina: A Profane Archaeology (2016), and American Afterlives: Reinventing Death in the Twenty-First Century (2021).
