ABSTRACT
Archaeological theory and performance history offer challenges to the valorisation of the present-tense as the locus of performance's occurrence, instead implying entanglements of the experience of the live with the remains of performance and posing, questions over the stability of the archive as source and record. Interpretive archaeology challenged the assumptions of the 'new' archaeology emerging in the 1960s that methods based in anthropological science could provide positive knowledge, unaffected by the context and conditions under which the practices of archaeology take place. Entanglement rests also on the agency of things and objects. The equivocal relationships between performance, documentation and material remains that re-staging and re-use often enact are, in fact, also in the history and practice of performance art. 'Liveness' surrounds the artefacts, is carried forward in the stories and associations in which the things gain meaning and remains evident in their potential.
