Archaeology and the Senses: Human Experience, Memory, and Affect

by Yannis Hamilakis

This book is an exciting new look at how archaeology has dealt with the bodily senses and offers an argument for how the discipline can offer a richer glimpse into the human sensory experience. Yannis Hamilakis shows how, despite its intensely physical engagement with the material traces of the past, archaeology has mostly neglected multi-sensory experience, instead prioritizing isolated vision and relying on the Western hierarchy of the five senses. In place of this limited view of experience, Hamilakis proposes a sensorial archaeology that can unearth the lost, suppressed, and forgotten sensory and affective modalities of humans. Using Bronze Age Crete as a case study, Hamilakis shows how sensorial memory can help us rethink questions ranging from the production of ancestral heritage to large-scale social change, and the cultural significance of monuments. Tracing the emergence of palaces in Bronze Age Crete as a celebration of the long-term, sensuous history and memory of their localities, Hamilakis points the way to reconstituting archaeology as a sensorial and affective multi-temporal practice. At the same time, he proposes a new framework on the interaction between bodily senses, things, and environments, which will be relevant to scholars in other fields.

Genres: Archaeology, History, Anthropology

270 pages, Hardcover

First published December 18, 2013

About the author

Yannis Hamilakis has studied at the University of Crete (BA History and Archaeology), and the University of Sheffield (MSc and PhD). He has taught at the University of Wales Lampeter (1996-2000) and the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (2005). He has been Wiener Lab Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies, Athens (2002-2003), Mary Seeger O'Boyle Fellow at Princeton University (1999), Library Fellow at Princeton University (2000), Margo Tytus Fellow at the University of Cincinnati (2003), Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2005-2006) and Member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (2012-13). He was the 2005 Royal Academy of Sweden-funded visiting lecturer to all Swedish Classics Departments, and the 2006 W B Stanford Lecturer at Trinity College Dublin, In the last few years he has been an invited keynote speaker at major conferences in Melbourne (Aegean prehistory), Dublin (World Archaeological Congress), Carbondale, IL (Archaeology of the Senses), Providence RI (TAG-USA, and "Engaged Scholarship" workshop), Nottingham (Archaeology of Food), Heidelberg ("Minoan" archaeology), San Felipe in Chile (Theoretical Archaeology in South America) and elsewhere.

Yannis is committed to an anthropologically-informed, critical archaeological engagement with past and present material culture, and to the inter-disciplinary nature of archaeological work. This position recognises the historically contingent nature of archaeology as a device of western modernity, as well as its potential to enable a critical and reflexive experiential encounter with the material world. He also believes on a politically commited archaeological and academic practice, devoted to social justice.

He was founding member and co-ordinator of the Radical Archaeology Forum, and founding member and first director of the University of Wales Centre for the Study of SE Europe, and chair and co-ordinator of the task-force on 'Archaeologists and War' for the World Archaeological Congress (WAC). He is currently co-ordinator of the group, Laboratory for Social Zooarchaeology at the University of Southampton. From 2007 to 2010 he directed the archaeological ethnography project at Kalaureia (Poros) Greece, and since 2010 he co-directs a major new field project, the Koutroulou Magoula Archaeology and Archaeological Ethnography Project, which centres around the excavation of an important Middle Neolithic tell site in Greece.

His main research and teaching interests are the archaeology of the body and of bodily senses, the archaeology of eating and drinking, social zooarchaeology, the socio-politics of the past, archaeology and nationalism, archaeological ethnography, archaeology and photography, and critical pedagogy in archaeology. Although much of his fieldwork is to do with the prehistoric (Neolithic and Bronze Age) Aegean, many of his projects are multi-temporal. He has published eleven books and many articles, including:

'Archaeology and the Senses: Human Experience, Memory, and Affect (2013)'
'The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece' (2007, 2009) which won the Edmund Keeley Book Prize in 2009 and was shortlisted for the Runciman Prize
Archaeological Ethnographies (2009). His media appearances include national Greek press, radio and TV, the BBC (In Our Time, Making History, The Forum etc), NPR, SBS, et al.
He serves on the editorial board of the journals:

Annual Review of Anthroplogy (2014-)
Journal of Contemporary Archaeology (2014-)
Classical Receptions Journal (2009-)
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (inc Man) (2005-2007)
Archaeologies: The Journal of the World Archaeological Congress (2005-)
Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology (2004-)
Annual of the British School at Athens (2004-)
Aegean Archaeology (2002-)
Eterotites (2004-)
Research in Archaeological Education (2007-)
Current Swedish Archaeology (2011-)
Forum Kritische Archäolog

Reviews

[Ellana Thornton-Wheybrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was fascinating.

I think it is easy to gloss over how much of our world is dominated by so few senses, and so we see with a modern lens the history of the world without considering the other senses.

[Jade · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought the first three quarters were great, but it fell apart in his case studies where he failed to adequately demonstrate how his theoretical approach could be scientifically attached to the archaeological data.