Undoing Things

Gavin Lucas is a Professor of Archaeology at the University of Iceland. He has had an enduring interest in the way archaeologists think and work, reflected in various books such as Critical Approaches to Fieldwork (2001), Understanding the Archaeological Record (2012), Writing the Past (2021), and Archaeological Situations (2022). Alongside this has been a recurrent interest in the concept of time: The Archaeology of Time (2005), Making Time (2020), and with Laurent Olivier, Conversations on Time (2021) while his main focus of fieldwork has been on the archaeology of the last 500 years.Shannon Lee Dawdy is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Dawdy’s fieldwork combines archival, ethnographic, and archaeological methods. Her work has focused on the history of colonialism and capitalism, human-material relations, temporality, and the archaeology of contemporary life. Her books include Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans (2008), Patina: A Profane Archaeology (2016), and American Afterlives: Reinventing Death in the Twenty-First Century (2021).

• List of Figures;List of Tables; List of Contributors; Chapter 1. Introduction; Section 1. Undoing Objects: Chapter 2. Decomposition: Book History Beyond the Book; Chapter 3. Letting be(come): Undoings at the Museum; Chapter 4. Precarious Heritage and Weak Artifacts: the Doing and Undoing of the Polish Women’s Strike; Chapter 5. Undoing and Entropy in the Archaeological Record; Chapter 6. The Doing in Undoing; Section 2. Undoing Bodies: Chapter 7. Undoing Animals among the Classic Maya: Turtles, Deer and Monkeys; Chapter 8. How to Assemble a Cross-Species History. Herders, Dams, Animal Younglings, and the Substance of Milk; Chapter 9. Undoing Animals and the Consequences; Abattoirs and Other Sources of Waste in 18th-and 19th-Century New Orleans; Chapter 10. Undoing African American Human Remains; Section 3. Undoing Places: Chapter 11. Revenant Landscapes: Toxic Industrial Waste and the Archaeology of Slow Violence; Chapter 12. Geographies of Undoing; Chapter 13. Places Undone by Terrain; Chapter 14. Before and after the Flood: Archaeological Sites and the Exploitation of Rivers in Northern Sweden; Chapter 15. The Politics of Precarity and the Undoing of Agricultural Expansion on the Medieval Deccan, Southern India; Section 4. Undoing Worlds: Chapter 16. Settler Ontocide; Chapter 17. Recalcitrant Data and the Concept of Decline in the Archaeology of Plantation Sites; Chapter 18. Death and the Maiden – Scars and the Mnemonics of Ruination; Chapter 19. Archaeologies of Black Futurity: Sketches of Liberia’s Monuments and Ruins; Chapter 20. Contemporary Doomsday Devices and the Undoing of End-Times; Index.