Persistence alone, however, is insufficient for memory. If every enduring trace were already memory, memory would be automatic and indiscriminate. Such an account collapses memory into mere duration. Memory requires more than endurance: it requires that traces enter into relations.

Before it is read, it is not yet a trace. After it is read, it is never just itself again. The trace exists only in the encounter. It becomes a trace only when something enters into relation with it, a gaze, a body, a tool, a question, a method.

Archaeology is always already political, because its interpretations of the past shape identities, heritage, and claims to belonging, and can and are mobilised by states, institutions, and communities as tools of power, exclusion, or legitimation. But archaeology is political also because it speaks about the Other in order to sustain itself. It is a collective practice that studies the persistence, fracture, and failure of human ways of living together, while continuously organising, regulating, and disciplining social relations within its own community. How archaeologists live and work together is not external to knowledge production; it is constitutive of it.

Neanderthal fingerprint art was among the discoveries.

Because archaeology has not finished. The past is turning into the future in front of us. Archaeology happens now, under our feet, in the air, in the oceans, in the cities, in the landfills. Life is constantly turning into remains, into matter that lasts and stays.

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Four massive stone traps hidden in the hills of Slovenia and Italy suggest that Europe’s earliest communities engineered landscapes to capture not just animals, but collective purpose.

Scientists have discovered evidence of stone megastructures on the Karst Plateau on the border of Slovenia and Italy that were most likely built before the Late Bronze Age.

Airborne laser scanning survey of the Karst Plateau in the Adriatic hinterland has revealed four monumental dry-stone structures, characterized by ...

On a slope above our house lives a buzzard. Her sharp cries shake me out of the current of human things I am caught in; and when I look up at the sky, I see her circling overhead. The question that rises is not new, but I want to ask it again, not what it is like to be a bat, but what it is like to be a buzzard.

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