ABSTRACT
In this contribution, the authors explore, with illumination from Ingold, the material and sensory worlds revealed and constructed by both archaeologists and eco-builders in these times of climate change. We begin with a humble hand tool found in both their practices, the trowel; we consider how trowels might act as prisms in both the uncovering of the past and the building of the future. As we watch the archaeologist scrape away the layers of time, we see the counter-movement of the eco-builder who adds layers of earthen plaster to the wall they have raised. Our discussion follows how portraits of these tools-in-use, these simple technologies, might speak to the relation between reality and the imagined, between feeling, perception, making and imagining.
As the archaeologist and the builder work, we see them making things manifest and skillfully attending to their crafts and acknowledge their creativity within streams of material and the flux of the environment-world that we are within and that we share with the other-than or more-than-human. Our discussion notes the political dimensions of their activities, technologies and temporality, and the radicalism of both other ways of doing and writing about these other ways of doing. We draw upon them to think about the necessity, as both academics and as citizens of a shared world, of going along alternative routes and across non-professionalised and non-/inter-disciplinary activities and grounds in order to cut what is still a hopeful path through these landscapes of the Anthropocene.
