ABSTRACT
The idea behind Archaeology in Public in Annapolis was to provide illumination, or a sense of awareness, about the connections between past and present (Althusser 1969, 1971; Baranik et al. 1977; Bernstein 1983; Blakey 1983; Clarke 1973; Eagleton 1985–86; Feyerabend 1970; Foster 1974; Geuss 1981) in the actual presence of an open excavation. We produced a few exhibits, a guidebook, many pamphlets, and a slide show, but these never worked well. I drew the idea of illumination from Georg Lukacs. Lukacs (1971a) argued that the job of a historical scholar within the Marxist tradition was to show the roots of modern exploitative practices (Handsman 1980a, 1980b, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1985, 1986). I thought the capacity of landscapes to focus on locales of desired power would be a good way to elucidate the city’s gardens and the city plan within a context that went beyond symmetry, horticulture, and aesthetics. I thought exhibits of ceramics arranged in graduated forms and styles could be a way of teaching the role of personal discipline. I thought exhibiting toothbrushes from archaeologically excavated sites could show that personal hygiene had an origin point as well as a context. The context was to show that, while people were being taught, raised, and defined as individuals, they were actually being defined as interchangeable members of a working class. Individualism was a mask hiding the reality of mass-produced people who worked in environments of mass production.
