Theme:
1. Archaeologists and Archaeology Here and Now
Session format:
Session with keynote presentation and discussion
Title:
Archaeology as Study of the Future
Content:
Whereas archaeology’s subject matter is the past, postmodern and critical approaches have claimed that all archaeology reflects on the present. However, little attention has been paid to archaeology’s potential to explore the future.
Futurology has unlaced the opaque package of “the future” to some degree. Most expectations of the future are based on the assumption that the current system simply continues to run and can be optimized. This assumption satisfies our longing for certainty and forms the basis for technological visions such as geoengineering, but also for cultural heritage. To a certain extent, such developments can be analysed with probabilistic approaches that extend patterns of the past into the future. However, indications that systems could become unstable, chaotic and thus unpredictable in the medium and long term cannot be ignored. For that reason, resilience is required to cope with ruptures and non-linear developments. In the long term, the future may look so completely different from today that we cannot even imagine it. This future is not accessible scientifically and therefore considered the domain of art. But is it?
Archaeologists, who survey the entire human past, see stranger things than almost any other discipline. We are experts in difference as much as in similarity, and it is in our hands to narrate “history”: to imagine past lifeworlds from the perspective of today, whether surprisingly different or disappointingly similar. Is archaeology therefore not best placed to think around the unthinkable? To imagine unimagined futures? And to analyse and evaluate the risks, side effects and potentials of such unimaginable futures as our potential futures?
We invite contributions on how archaeology can or already contributes to analytical knowledge or reflexive design of any of these three futures: the optimized, the unpredictable, or the unimagined future.
Keywords:
Futurology, Heritage, Optimisation, Unpredictability, Unimagined
Session associated with MERC:
no
Session associated with CIfA:
no
Session associated with SAfA:
no
Session associated with CAA:
no
Session associated with DGUF:
no
Session associated with other:
Main organiser:
Thomas Meier (Germany) 1,2
Co-organisers:
Cornelius Holtorf (Sweden) 3
Anders Högberg (Sweden) 4
Affiliations:
1. Kaete Hamburger Center for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies, Heidelberg University, Germany
2. Institute for Pre- and Protohistory, Heidelberg University, Germany
3. Heritage Futures I Archaeology, School of Cultural Sciences, Linnaeus University Kalmar, Sweden
4. School of Cultural Sciences | Archaeology, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Linnaeus University Kalmar, Sweden
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