ABSTRACT
Archaeology is, as every student has learned, ‘the study of the human past through the material traces of it that have survived’ (Bahn 2000: 2). In this chapter I draw a contrast between this definition and another: archaeology is an engagement with ‘old’ things (ta archaia) and their connections with an aim to understand the past and its relevance to life. My aim in so doing is to tease out some differences between these two definitions in terms of how we situate both the past and things. With the former definition, the past, as an image of what was, is often regarded as starting point for archaeological endeavour. With the latter, the past is an achievement realized through kinetic engagements with ‘old’ things (and new) and the memories that they hold. With the former, things, be they rock-cut voids, stone walls or last week’s rubbish, are treated as intermediaries, that is, they are important insofar as they provide a means to reach something else; to reach the past-that-was. With the latter, one begins with ‘old’ things, in their midst (in medias res), and the past-that-was is situated as an outcome of a long series of transformations. Indeed, regarding the past as starting point for archaeological endeavour in what we say we do has often led to a situation where it is either assumed to exist apart from the conditions of its own production, or it is taken, erroneously, to be largely encapsulated by these conditions. However, to recognize how the past is co-extensive with the practices that produce it is not to reduce the past to those practices, for things as ta archaia – remnants, vestiges, ruins, residues, etc. – play a role in this production (Olsen et al. 2012).
