Archaeology and the Senses

Human Experience, Memory, and Affect

Yannis Hamilakis author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:20th Jan '14

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Archaeology and the Senses cover

An exciting look at how archaeology has dealt with the bodily senses and how it can offer a richer glimpse into the human sensory experience.

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 proposes a novel framework for understanding the bodily senses and their interaction with things and environments.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 prioritising 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. Hamilakis points the way to reconstituting archaeology as a sensorial and affective multi-temporal practice.

'This book goes far beyond a study of archaeology, the past, and the traditional senses of the modern Western world. It presents an innovative strategy that, through a broad approach to a sensorially inspired archaeology, enables the past to be written as a rich and affective palimpsest, while maintaining the standards and rigors of archaeological investigation.' Ruth Tringham, University of California, Berkeley
'This is an extremely well-researched book which draws heavily on philosophical, historical, and anthropological thinking but embeds it excellently within the relevant archaeological literature. It should be attractive to all students and academics who wish to challenge the conventions of archaeological interpretation - it forms an important statement that future archaeologists may in time regard as a classic.' Paul Rainbird, University of Bristol
'Richly evocative, theoretically innovative, and written by a leading figure in the field, Archaeology and the Senses opens up new terrain in the anthropology of the senses. The accessibility of this book will make it a touchstone for scholars and students interested in new approaches to the interpretation of material objects.' David Sutton, Southern Illinois University
'… a valuable study of cultural thinking - and a very enjoyable one to read at the same time … [Hamilakis] produces a fact-based, culturally sensitive and theoretically subtle reading which, although at first might not seem groundbreaking, is in fact exactly that.' Dimitris Plantzos, Historein
'Despite the complex philosophical and historical analysis in the first half of the book, it is an accessible work that does not require specialist knowledge to decipher, something the author should be proud of.' Kay Armstrong, Antike Welt
'Anyone familiar with Hamilakis' output will recognise recurrent themes in this book: memory, personhood, commensality, reflexivity, politics and, of course, the senses. Pulling these topics together, the book represents a significant statement by one of the leading thinkers within archaeology.' Jo Day, Antiquity

ISBN: 9780521837286

Dimensions: 231mm x 155mm x 23mm

Weight: 530g

270 pages