Archaeologies of Placemaking is the outcome of a WAC-5 session at Washington, D.C. in 2003. The following review of this volume is divided into two parts. The first part provides a summary of the nine chapters, and the second offers... Oscar Aldred

I have been fascinated by the implications of the speculative turn for archaeology for some time now (Graham Harman's blog provides a conduit to the world of speculative realism; Harman currently has several books in press on the topic). I... Christopher Witmore http://traumwerk.stanford.edu:3455/witmore/Home

Numerous studies have focused on modernity’s destructive effect on traditional life- worlds, the desertion of villages and the ruination of rural areas. However, the fact that the modern condition also produces its own ruined materialities, its own marginalized pasts,... Bjørnar Olsen ruinmemories.org

James Symonds (University of Oulu, Finland) For more than 150 years archaeology has had a clear purpose, to sketch out the topography of the past from the pinnacle of the present. Like the traveller’s gaze in Shelley’s Ozymandius, archaeologists have... James Symonds

The times when artifacts come to light - the moments of discovery as it were - are crucial moments in that they precipitate discussion and argument amongst scientists about what is real and what is not, what is natural and what is artificial, how the artifacts got to be there, how to interpret them, and what to do about them. Matt Edgeworth http://traumwerk.stanford.edu:3455/edgeworth/Home

John M. Chenoweth (UC Berkeley) From October 16 to 18, participants met at Keble College, Oxford, for the 2009 CHAT conference. Over 30 papers engaged with the theme “Modern Materials: the archaeology of things from the early modern, modern, and... John M. Chenoweth http://anthropology.berkeley.edu/people/person_detail.php?person=126