Books are crucial to our understanding of our place in time and space, because they are fundamentally composed of time and space. They carry with them the history of thought, of physical presence and of psychological evolution that created them, and moved them forward. To understand ourselves we need to understand our past. To understand our past we need to examine the artifacts we carry with us, which carry us forward.
Michael Shanks – “A lot of people think that archaeologist discover the past. And that’s only a tiny bit true. I think it’s more accurate to say that they work on what remains. That may sometimes involve, absolutely, coming across stuff from the past, but the key thing about archaeology is that it works on what’s left of the past. As we explore this stuff, we figure out how to bring it forward, into the present, through our interpretation of it.”
My vision of the role of the Literary Archaeologist is; to attempt to reanimate the archives, to recreate the cultural past through the cultural present by recycling, reworking and remixing artifacts and books that are left of the past.
There exists a serious challenge with material culture, artifacts once discovered are archived and placed in a repository only to be stored and preserved, becoming static.The trail and the remains of the past may be dormant, but they exist, waiting to be revived or resurrected into something else.The only way the past is going to stay relevant, is if it is taken up and reworked, remixed. We have to take artifacts and archives and revitalize them, make them live again, inserting them into the present,to give direction to the future. We need to give them new material forms that people can engage with. Unless there is a reason to reuse stuff, it’ll fall out of use or be stored away, and eventually destroyed.
