 |
 |
Janet Miller, Brigitte Buss and I (Atkins Heritage) would like to invite contributions to our session at this year’s
IFA conference, Impact ‐ What Impact? Legacy ‐ What Legacy? Archaeology and the loss of confidence. We invite contributors to put up behemoths, projects, movements and standards of archaeology and heritage of the last umpteen years that have or should
have changed the way we practice and paper by paper, examine and challenge the impact and ‘legacy’ of each, of how paradigm-shifting projects or ideas have or have not been taken on or embedded by the sector. Ideally each would be investigated by someone who
was embedded within their subject’s practice or parameters.
I have copied the abstract below. The session will be on the morning of Friday 19th April.
Please contact me with potential abstracts or any questions.
Yours,
Sefryn
Sefryn Penrose
Senior Heritage Consultant, Water & Environment
ATKINS
75 years of design, engineering and project management excellence
Euston Tower, 286 Euston Road, London, NW1 3AT
|
Tel: +44 0207 121 2656
| Mobile: +44 7949 039099
Email:
[log in to unmask]
| Web: www.atkinsglobal.com
|
Facebook: www.facebook.com/atkinsglobal
| YouTube: www.youtube.com/wsatkinsplc
|
At the end of his 1973 polemic Archaeology and the Loss of Innocence, David Clarke stated that “the practical excavator should appreciate more than any other archaeologist the degree to which his practice is controlled by his
theoretical expectations, and these should accordingly be appropriate”. In the decades since that work was published, there have been other paradigm shifting moments for archaeological and heritage thinking. Have these challenges to the orthodoxy and the resulting
heated debates led to revolutions in our practice? Or did the “expansion of consciousness” that Clarke urged us to embrace lead to a lack of confidence in the value of an archaeological perspective?
Attempts to measure impact and legacy join the continued dominance of preservation – in situ and by record – in archaeology’s preoccupation with the future; while concerns around social impact and conservation have prioritised
the presentation of a perceived ‘authentic’ past and view ‘memories’ as data. Archaeological practice in and for the present, meanwhile, falls back on tried and tested forms that rarely carry the hallmark of major theoretical innovations.
The IFA is on the cusp of royal charterdom, a cornerstone of establishment, and many of the anti‐establishment figures
of the post‐processual movement and the vanguard of social archaeology and inclusive heritage are now part of the ‘old guard’. This session will
critically examine the contribution of this extraordinary generation, their impact on practice, and the ‘legacy’ of archaeology’s loss of innocence for the generations of today and tomorrow.
This will not be a show‐and‐tell
session. It will be substantial, challenging, critical, argumentative. Each paper will take as their starting‐point
one seminal work or project that proposed or reflected major theoretical or methodological shifts in our discipline and consider their
lasting
impact on archaeological and heritage practice.
Contributions are invited on (but are not limited to) the practical legacy of the following moments:
·
Post‐processualism
·
The ‘Material Culture Turn’
·
Archaeologies of the Contemporary
·
Gender and Archaeology
·
World Archaeology
·
Conservation Management Planning
·
The Heathrow Terminal 5 Excavation
·
Community/Public Archaeology
·
Archaeology in the media