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We’re all archaeologists now How and why every car collector should embrace their inner archaeological self

Michael Shanks archaeologist, anthropologist, classicist, digital humanist

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The Revs Program at Stanford !

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archaeologists don’t discover the past they work with what remains

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site | artifact | landscape

encounter | triage | collection | organization | care

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duration | actuality | presence

archaeological times — think of layering, palimpsest, ruin, entropy, encounter, reanimation, percolation

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active intervention — the animated archive

collective memory — not a record of the past but the act of recollection put things in a box and they’ll rot — keeping things alive means keeping them in motion

historical significance is always a matter of advocacy the past is not fixed but dynamic

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experiment — performance — theatre/archaeology

the rearticulation of fragments of the past as real time event experiences of intervention in the ruin of the past

storytelling is a kind of reanimation

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art and mundanity

always connected in a living past

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coevolution

we are our things

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deep knowledge and the fragment

context means life (things live because they’re connected) but there are always gaps that require conjecture, restoration, reconstruction, fiction

narrative can fill the gaps

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heritage — legacy

ways the past matters to the present ways we value the past-in-the-present for-the-future

the challenge of “the archive”

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always collaborative, dispersed, distributed

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some thoughts for the car collector

the car is always an assemblage think less of dates and more of archaeological time — duration, encounter, presence, care

a living past requires triage, intervention, engagement, mobilization collecting the past is about choices made for the future

rise to the challenge of the archive — it’s who we are and it’s always “we”