Undoing Things

How Objects, Bodies and Worlds Come Apart

Gavin Lucas (University of Iceland, Iceland), Shannon Lee Dawdy

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English

Routledge
30 April 2025

Archaeological theory; Archaeology by period & region

Series: Archaeological Orientations

Undoing Things explores all the ways in which things become undone, be they objects, bodies, places, or worlds.

Although archaeologists have long attended to the productive dimensions of materiality and material culture as a coherent phenomenon—making objects, building things, constructing identities—the discourse around undoing is more fragmented. Topics such as ruination, death, decay, demolition, and collapse are usually examined separately. Undoing Things asks what connections or continuities can be discerned in a diverse range of practices, both intentional and taphonomic, both destructive and healing. Is there a creative component to undoing? How visible are different processes of undoing? How is time implicated? Is undoing reversible? Who has the power to undo and when is undoing empowering? What does it take to undo knowledge? These and other questions are examined through archaeological studies ranging from classical Maya and colonial Caribbean examples to present-day Liberia, historical and ethnographic approaches to present-day Argentina, and the contemporary art world.

In the first quarter of the 21st century, human worlds have experienced a series of ruptures from climate-related disasters, political violence, and the Covid-19 pandemic. Undoing Things helps move us beyond a cloud of chaos with a deeper understanding of how and why things fall apart and is vital reading for archaeologists and those in related disciplines.

Edited by: Gavin Lucas (University of Iceland Iceland), Shannon Lee Dawdy
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 246mm, Width: 174mm,
Weight: 710g
ISBN: 9781032061825
ISBN 10: 1032061820
Series: Archaeological Orientations
Pages: 360
Publication Date: 30 April 2025
Audience: General/trade , College/higher education , ELT Advanced , Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

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).