ABSTRACT
In this paper, I address (multi) media archaeology in two parts: first, an epistemological reflection on the term "media archaeology" and second, literal case studies. But, before I begin (arche), I want to reflect on the term "archaeology of multi-media" itself. Having been trained as a historian, a classicist and an archaeologist (in the disciplinary sense), I have always felt uneasy with the predominance of narrative as the uni -medium of processing our knowledge of the past. Theoretically, works like Michel Foucault's LArcheologie du Savoir1 and Hayden White's seminal Metahistorf have helped me express this unease with the rhetoric of historical imagination. It took, however, a new infrastructure of communicating realities-the impact of digital media-to put this critique of historical discourse into media-archaeological terms and practice. But caution: Even when we claim to perform media-archaeological analysis, we easily slip back into telling media stories.
