Routledge Archaeologies of the Contemporary World – serie

After Discourse is an interdisciplinary response to the recent trend away from linguistic and textual approaches and towards things and their affects.The new millennium brought about serious changes to the intellectual landscape. Favoured approaches associated with the linguistic and the textual turn lost some of their currency, and were followed by a new curiosity and concern for things and their natures. Gathering contributions from archaeology, heritage studies, history, geography, literature and philosophy, After Discourse offers a range of reflections on what things are, how we become affected by them, and the ethical concerns they give rise to. Through a varied constellation of case studies, it explores ways of dealing with matters which fall outside, become othered from, or simply cannot be grasped through perspectives derived solely from language and discourse.After Discourse provides challenging new perspectives for scholars and students interested in other-than-textual encounters between people and the objects with which we share the world.

After Discourse is an interdisciplinary response to the recent trend away from linguistic and textual approaches and towards things and their affects.The new millennium brought about serious changes to the intellectual landscape. Favoured approaches associated with the linguistic and the textual turn lost some of their currency, and were followed by a new curiosity and concern for things and their natures. Gathering contributions from archaeology, heritage studies, history, geography, literature and philosophy, After Discourse offers a range of reflections on what things are, how we become affected by them, and the ethical concerns they give rise to. Through a varied constellation of case studies, it explores ways of dealing with matters which fall outside, become othered from, or simply cannot be grasped through perspectives derived solely from language and discourse.After Discourse provides challenging new perspectives for scholars and students interested in other-than-textual encounters between people and the objects with which we share the world.

For over 50 years, the white radomes of the Teufelsberg have been one of Berlin’s most prominent landmarks. For half of this time the city lay over 100 miles behind an 'Iron Curtain' that divided East from West, and was surrounded by communist East Germany and the densest concentration of Warsaw Pact military forces in Europe. From the vantage point high on the Teufelsberg, British and American personnel constantly monitored the electronic emissions from the surrounding military forces, as well as high-level political intelligence. Today, the Teufelsberg stands as a contemporary and spectacular ruin, representing a significant relic of a lost cyber space of Cold War electronic emissions and espionage. Based on archaeological fieldwork and recently declassified documents, this book presents a new history of the Teufelsberg and other Western intelligence gathering sites in Berlin. At a time when intelligence gathering is once more under close scrutiny, when questions are being asked about the intelligence relationship between the United States and Russia, and amidst wider debate about the US’s National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence programmes, sites like the Teufelsberg raise questions that appear both important and timely.

This work investigates the material culture of public temperatures in New York City. Numbers like temperature, while ubiquitous and indispensable to capitalized social relations, are often hidden away within urban infrastructures evading attention. This Archaeology of Temperature brings such numbers to light, interrogating how we construct them and how they construct us.Building on discussions in contemporary archaeology this book challenges the border between material and discursive culture, advocating for a novel conception of capitalism’s artifacts. The artifacts examined within (temperatures) are instantaneous electric pulses, algorithmic outputs, and momentary fluctuations in mercury. The artifacts of the capitalized never sit still, operating at subatomic and solar scales. Temperatures, as numerical materials precariously straddling the colonially constructed nature-culture divide, exemplify the abstraction necessary to pursue the perpetually accelerating asymmetrical growth of wealth—a pursuit that engenders multiple environmental and economic calamities. An Archaeology of Temperature innovatively reimagines theory and method within contemporary archaeology. Equally, in plumbing the depths of temperature, this book offers indispensable contributions to science studies, urban geography, semiotics, the philosophy of materiality, the history of thermodynamics, heterodox economics, performative scholarship, and queer ecocriticism.

This work investigates the material culture of public temperatures in New York City. Numbers like temperature, while ubiquitous and indispensable to capitalized social relations, are often hidden away within urban infrastructures evading attention. This Archaeology of Temperature brings such numbers to light, interrogating how we construct them and how they construct us.Building on discussions in contemporary archaeology this book challenges the border between material and discursive culture, advocating for a novel conception of capitalism’s artifacts. The artifacts examined within (temperatures) are instantaneous electric pulses, algorithmic outputs, and momentary fluctuations in mercury. The artifacts of the capitalized never sit still, operating at subatomic and solar scales. Temperatures, as numerical materials precariously straddling the colonially constructed nature-culture divide, exemplify the abstraction necessary to pursue the perpetually accelerating asymmetrical growth of wealth—a pursuit that engenders multiple environmental and economic calamities. An Archaeology of Temperature innovatively reimagines theory and method within contemporary archaeology. Equally, in plumbing the depths of temperature, this book offers indispensable contributions to science studies, urban geography, semiotics, the philosophy of materiality, the history of thermodynamics, heterodox economics, performative scholarship, and queer ecocriticism.

This book explores the archaeology of the 1947 Partition, the largest mass migration in human history, and the resulting resettlement of half a million refugees in Delhi, India’s capital city.Interweaving material analysis with oral history collection and archival sources, this book considers how Delhi’s Partition refugees have interacted with the city's built landscapes through time. It demonstrates how government-built refugee colonies, influenced by both socialist and capitalist design philosophies, provided an effective and adaptable setting for resettlement. In contrast, it illustrates how Delhi’s pre-Partition landscapes—including ‘evacuee properties’ vacated by out-migrating Muslims and sections of the planned, colonial capital—have proven more problematic venues for rehousing. In these contexts, refugee families navigated life within homes shaped by past occupants and colonial-era wealth disparities. The book highlights that despite such difficulties and the unprecedented scale of Partition’s impact on Delhi, refugees have obtained an impressive degree of material success and social acceptance in the city. This example challenges assumptions about the aid-dependency of refugee communities, the potential effectiveness of public housing, and the mutability of national belonging.This interdisciplinary case study will be of interest to scholars in varied fields of study, including archaeology, architectural history, cultural anthropology, human geography, and South Asian studies.

This book explores the archaeology of the 1947 Partition, the largest mass migration in human history, and the resulting resettlement of half a million refugees in Delhi, India’s capital city.Interweaving material analysis with oral history collection and archival sources, this book considers how Delhi’s Partition refugees have interacted with the city's built landscapes through time. It demonstrates how government-built refugee colonies, influenced by both socialist and capitalist design philosophies, provided an effective and adaptable setting for resettlement. In contrast, it illustrates how Delhi’s pre-Partition landscapes—including ‘evacuee properties’ vacated by out-migrating Muslims and sections of the planned, colonial capital—have proven more problematic venues for rehousing. In these contexts, refugee families navigated life within homes shaped by past occupants and colonial-era wealth disparities. The book highlights that despite such difficulties and the unprecedented scale of Partition’s impact on Delhi, refugees have obtained an impressive degree of material success and social acceptance in the city. This example challenges assumptions about the aid-dependency of refugee communities, the potential effectiveness of public housing, and the mutability of national belonging.This interdisciplinary case study will be of interest to scholars in varied fields of study, including archaeology, architectural history, cultural anthropology, human geography, and South Asian studies.

How the rural world in Western Europe became modern? Who were the main agents of this change? Did these transformations have an impact on the local environment? This book explores the process of transformation of Western pre-industrial rural societies into industrialized ones through an archaeologically driven analysis based on two villages in northwestern Iberia.After a theoretical consideration of what is the process of modernity and how it can be approached, the book is organized chronologically, considering the transformations of the rural world in northwestern Iberia over time from the 18th century to the COVID-19 pandemic. Departing from a critique of the abstract and Eurocentric common approaches to modernity, this book seeks to build strong and thick narratives of the process of modernity as a historical process from a local point of view, benefiting from approaches such as microhistory and historical anthropology. Tackling the process of transformation of modern rural communities from an archaeological point of view, chapters are oriented by the analysis of different strands of material records and their changes over time, from specific materialities to archaeobotanical data and aerial photography. This book renders visible the deep roots of the transformation to industrialization that has characterized Western Europe ever since and sets forth some reflections and considerations for its future.This book is intended for researchers in the fields of historical and contemporary archaeology as well as modernity studies, industrial archaeology and history and social history.