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: 870g
ISBN: 9781032064178
ISBN 10: 103206417X
Series: Archaeological Orientations
Pages: 360
Publication Date: 30 April 2025
Audience:
General/trade
,
College/higher education
,
ELT Advanced
,
Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
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 Time; Index.
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).
