Archaeology, Modernism, Modernity

Archaeologies of the Modern

"Archaeologies of the Modern" invites a double explanation: first, of a title that associates the modern(ist) scene with the excavation of apparently fragmentary pasts; second, of the issue's unconventional format. The issue is dialogical in structure and provocative in intent. It conjoins essays authored by cultural historians and by archaeologists, and accompanies each contribution by an archaeologist with a brief response from a cultural historian, and vice versa. The aim of this device, as well as of the special issue as a whole, is to inaugurate a dialogue between reflections on archaeology as a modern discipline and inquiries into the archaeological imagination in nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultural forms. We believe that this dialogue transgresses the limits of conventional interdisciplinarity because it excavates forms in the cultural imaginary that find a home in no orthodox disciplinary field.

One simple and limited aim of the issue is to contribute to the new history of archaeology. It was only in the 1980s that histories of the publications of supposed great and originary minds in archaeology ¹ were augmented by simple sociological and ideological motivation: for example, middle-class Anglo-American experience reflected in archaeological method and theory; ² nineteenth-century nationalisms fueling archaeological research into local origins. ³ Research into the history of archaeology based upon other than published sources had to wait until the mid-1990s (notably associated with the AREA Project: see Nathan Schlanger's contribution to the dossier in this issue).

Anything other than a strictly internalist account of archaeology may well be far off, but there is more to archaeology than the discipline. Here our issue's title points to a much wider aim of furthering what may be called an archaeological history of modernity and its cultural imaginary, modernism, through an exploration of their archaeological components.

To explain what we mean by this we begin with a classic modernist and archaeological gesture (one of Duchamp's readymades) and then sketch three archaeological moments of the last century or so. These lay the ground for a glossary of some key features of archaeological discourse that are the subject of this issue's papers.

An Archaeological Gesture

Consider the snow shovel chosen by Marcel Duchamp as the protagonist of In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915). The shovel poses fundamental questions about the nature of objects and their relation to the world. Duchamp's shovel was bought off the shelf of a hardware store, torn from the everyday and set in a museum gallery with a title. It is a fragment of the material culture of the early twentieth century, a piece of machine-age trash—quite unexceptional. But in its association with Duchamp, in its gallery siting, in its titling, it is also a special shovel. It bears an argument about the character of contemporary art (the gallery and its objects; the artist's work and choices). It prefigures a narrative (contemporary newspapers had carried the story of a man who had broken his arm clearing the streets of snow). It is also a relic, an object of worship and even pilgrimage, a fetish—preserved (and, indeed, recreated) for posterity so as to keep alive a distinctly modern practice of decontextualization and recontextualization.

The readymade piece of art is, of course, duplicitous. In the gallery it betrays its function and elicits new significances only through this betrayal. It is tagged with the story of a future denouement. It doesn't dig, but breaks arms. Duchamp's In Advance of the Broken Arm positions itself ahead of the work of digging, of uncovering and amassing. The shovel is an avant-bras: we might push the gesture further and say that In Advance of the Broken Arm moves in advance of a double movement that would break the arm of certain longstanding disciplinary conventions: an antiquarian tradition in archaeology with its...