Laurent offers profound elaboration of the fundamental insight that the past is all around us, before us, in material traces,

that presence is filled with the past,

that the future is not constructed with innovation per se, but is an ongoing project of working on what is left of the past, and on what will become the past

(those iterative acts at the heart of design thinking).

Bamburgh Hall, Northumberland UK, a village that was once the capital heart of Celtic Christianity, setting for Walter Besant’s historical novel of 1884 Dorothy Forster, set in the Jacobin uprising of 1715

This is something of an antithesis to historiography, that the writing of history establishes events, sequence, date, agency, causation. Instead Laurent celebrates Walter Benjamin’s attack on such historicism with his messianic time of the now – Jetztzeit, and takes up Henri Bergson’s metaphysics of duration.

There are four key components to this argument.

1) The temporality of archaeology, our most intimate human experience of the past, is not date and event, but what I term actuality – conjuncture, the articulation of past and present, rooted in the way the past can endure, albeit changed. Actulaity is the Greek kairos – a moment of re-connection, re-collection, when something prompts a link between past and present (hence Laurent sees this as memory practice).

2) There is in this articulation a melancholic paradox – the past’s material decay is the condition of its persistence. The past is gone, and, though we may wish to revisit, we can do so only on the basis of remains that must have changed. Forever now beyond experience, we can only know the past because it has changed, has become trace and vestige, and is thus with us now.

The present must decay. Immortality is not an option. Transiency is our condition of being, of the existence of the past in the present. Ruin and decay mean that the past can be a potential subject of experience and knowledge. Things can endure, through their material resistance to decay and ruin, and because we can care and protect, attend to old things.

3) This is a geneaological perspective, focused on chains of connection reaching back into time immemorial. Its main features are not plot and event (the drama of historicism), but everyday matters, the quotidian, material textures of life. Most of the past in the present is trivial and superficial.

I think of the fictions of Georges Perec and Alain Robbe-Grillet, indeed those too of Walter Scott, and how they foreground texture and indeterminacy. Consider how photography is a superb witness of precisely the superficial and everyday, mostly irrelevant noise against which we may wish to see event and drama in the gap between the moment of picture taking and viewing – the actuality of the photograph, the temporal gulf bridged by its materiality.

4) The past needs work, the present contains latent pasts ready to be re-activitaed, re-collected, re-articulated, re-presented in creative work – the craft of archaeology. In this geneaological perspective there are necessary breaks with the past, because memory depends upon forgetting. Memory does not hold onto the currency of the ongoing present, but is conjuncture – when something prompts a connection to be made with what had until then been forgotten, latent or dormant. The past returns in such creative acts, such hauntings that may appear quite uncanny, precisley because of the breaks in the flow of time.

See my book Experiencing the Past (1992) [Link]
The Archaeological Imagination (2012) [Link]
Archive 3.0 [Link]
Archaeography.com [Link]
Archaeographer.com [Link]
Ruin Memories [Link]

Daguerreotype, c 1850

Around Lordenshaws, across from the market town of Rothbury, are many carved rock surfaces, typically associated with farming communities from the fourth to and millennia BCE, maybe earlier and maybe later.

Birky Hill

I met Stan Beckensall, school teacher in Rothbury, rock art enthusiast, some thirty years ago – his lifetime’s recording of Northumberland’s rock art is available online – [Link] See also the superb work of the Northumberland and Durham Rock Art Pilot (NADRAP) Project (managed by Northumberland and Durham County Councils and funded by English Heritage). Their website and database (English Rock Art – ERA) build on and incorporate the Newcastle University Beckensall Archive.

INORA, the International Newsletter on Rock Art is available online – [Link]

Some years ago Sam (Schillace) put me onto a Russian photographer, Sergey Larenkov, who combines old and new photographs of Leningrad/St Petersburg, then – WWII, and now.

They have haunted me ever since.

It’s not difficult to find the photos on the web; it only took me a few moments to find them again – [Link]

“Then and now” “This happened here” – an aspect of the archaeological imagination.

(James Cameron did something similar with Ghosts of the Abyss – Titanic “then and now”)

Daguerreotype c 1850. Oblique view.

See the project Ghosts in the machine.

Photographs taken after the death of a child were popular in the mid nineteenth century.

Daguerreotype, 1850s, eastern USA.

Camera c 1947.

(Thanks again to Sam (Schillace) for this link.)

I regularly post about the horror that lies just beneath the surface of things, everyday normality rooted in the uncanny secret lives of things – have a look at Horror and disclosure – a scene of crime clings to its past

Joe (Adler) has just sent me word of Die Familie Schneider – An Art House Of Fear In Whitechapel. I do I wish I could see this!

The work is by Gregor Schneider and commissioned by Artangel.

Two apparently normal houses side by side.

Here is Camelia Gupta’s superb review on 24hourmuseum.org

I let myself in, wondering who I am to be letting myself into someone else’s house.

Shutting the door, I’m thus already a little nervous. The narrow corridors are claustrophobic. I hesitate in the doorway but my awareness that I only have 20 minutes to see both houses (one of several conditions of viewing) forces me on.

In the second house, I feel slightly braver. I wondered in the first house whether I was allowed to interact with the inhabitants of the houses but felt too oppressed. In an embarrassingly quavery and hesitant voice, I hail the woman in the kitchen. She ignores me. I’m not sure whether I want her to respond, as that would indicate that I belong in this world.

A world where violence seems to lurk at every edge. There’s the terrifying sexual graffiti in the attic, visible only through the keyhole of locked door with, most worryingly, a locked child-gate placed in front of it. Was a child kept here? Does this connect to the secret passage and its grim destination? On the other hand, being ignored has the effect of making me feel like a ghost, condemned to witness and absorb the horror but with no scope for action. Neither option appeals.

And in another related review -

There’s a woman in kitchen washing dishes endlessly, in a way that is reminiscent both of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and of Lady Macbeth’s “out damned spot”.

The 70s aesthetic of the bedroom is deeply unpleasant. The heat is suffocating, the carpet muffles my footsteps. I realise suddenly that there’s a body in a bag in the far corner. I feel faint for a second. It appears to be wearing a uniform and is small: child-sized.

Bathroom. A man masturbates in the shower, back turned and partially visible through curtains. I don’t know how to behave – and hover, while his pants and groans fill the small room. Needing distraction, I rummage through cupboards.

I’m glad that I have to write, I’m using it to anchor and ground myself, to remind myself that there’s a world beyond this one. I badly need the reminder right now. It’s hard to battle the sense that this awful space is all there is.

Deep breath, and onto the second house. Scared of what I’ll find. Another condition is that once you’ve left one house, you may not return to it.

On my god. It’s the same. But I’m different looking at it. I feel the need to look closely at the woman in the kitchen. As I say, I feel moved/able to speak to her. She’s exactly like the first one. (They’re twins.) In the bathroom, I’m moved to examine the wanking man to get closer. He seems louder than the first, but I cannot compare. Perhaps my mounting panic is heightening my senses?

I can’t know whether it’s the same, as I’m not allowed to go back and check.

Downstairs is also the same, and now I?m finding this sameness terrifying. What the hell is happening here? The repetition has varying effects; the carpeted room feels even more like a cell. I can hear nothing but my own, heavy, breathing. I’m scared – in the cellar, I’m reluctant to shut the door.

An archaeological sensibility holds that we only ever have fragments to work upon, that every locale is a potential scene of crime where anything could be evidence, that there remains to much to be discovered beneath the surface of things, and much that we will not like, because the stories we have been told are meant to console and quieten us …

Here are some extracts from our conversation.

TD There are a couple of points I’d really like to get into the film. First, the almost magical quality of wheat and that crop circles can be seen as an echo of ancient rites. Second, that people today really believe there’s something magical about this place (Wiltshire) and they point to all the prehistoric sites to say that even the ancients felt the same way. Whether or not it’s true, they believe it.

MS I think your instincts here are spot on – an echo maybe – certainly there is a recurrent theme of the aura of prehistoric monuments and senses of place.

A crucial contemporary attitude too is that of the perceived loss of an intimate relationship with the countryside (this is big news in the UK at the moment) – old ideas of the separation of city and country.

TD Is there a good (layman’s) overview of the Wiltshire’s history and religions?

MS English Heritage has a series of attractive guides – you have probably come across them – they include a series by the publishers Batsford. The one by Mike Parker Pearson on the Bronze Age is excellent.

A more academic (but good) read on prehistoric relationships with the land is Richard Bradley’s book on prehistoric monuments [Link]

Christopher Chippindale’s “Stonehenge Complete” is in a new edition – this is one of the best perhaps for you – it deals with how people have thought of the monuments and the land since they were built.

Then there is Barbara Bender on the meaning of Stonehenge – and she deals with New Age views very well – academic but chatty – “Stonehenge: Making Space”

TD Is there evidence that pre-Christians used bonfires as part of their worship or rituals? Or that bonfires carried on even into modern times? (I’m looking for an excuse to have a huge bonfire).

MS On prehistoric religion it is better to think less in terms of religious rites and institutions separate from everyday life, and more in terms of ways of life – ritual and belief, cosmology coterminous with everyday life. And everyday life back then was very strange.

TD What were some of their other planting and harvest-time rituals – any that involved practices we would find unusual today?

MS The calendar was clearly marked and understood – there is plenty of evidence for astronomical alignment and observation, knowledge too. There were two other cosmological ordering principles:
Land, place and the building of monuments – prehistoric northern Europe was ordered around a built environment – it may not look like an urban environment, but it was equally saturated in meanings, stories, histories, significances.
Relationships with the dead and with other species – very peculiar goings on in chambered and earthen monuments, fiddling with bones and much much more.

TD When and why were the barrows created?

MS There are different kinds and they date from the time of the first farmers through to the iron age in the early first millennium BC.

TD When and why were the original white horses created and what is their significance?

MS See all this as expression of the significance of location – place matters to these people.

TD Same with the stone formations?

MS Same with Silbury Hill.

TD How would I find out what iron age Britains wore?

MS There is a lot of information about bronze age and iron age dress in northern Europe – we have complete cloth outfits and much metal armor and the like. The English Heritage/Batsford series deals with it. See also bog bodies – many web sites.

TD And as a real leap into the New Age, what are leylines and is there anything to them?

MS Yes and no.

Prehistoric people in northern Europe were very sensitive to place – this is what we pick up on in their great stone and earthen sculptures. And not just the sites themselves, but the relationships between places. So archaeologists have become very sensitive to how sites and monuments connect together in a region like Wessex or Wiltshire, how they form what I just called a built environment.

So yes – there are prehistoric alignments. And they were/are charged with cultural meaning/significance/power.

But this is not what most people understand by ley lines. These are alignments of sites across many historic periods, and they don’t sustain scrutiny. It is a statistical commonplace that there will be several alignments in any random scatter of points. And supposing that the lines are tapping into some lost/unknown/secret knowledge of earth powers is amusing but a little silly.

You are tuning into a network of histories, beliefs, projections that include Druidism, neo-paganism, and the Celtic revival.

One of my favorite ruminations on all this is the movie Wicker Man [Link to a blog entry of mine] [Another link] I am convinced this is one of the sources for California’s Burning Man festival (just ended this weekend in Black Rock City) [Link to Patrick Roddie's superb Burning Man photography - somatic materialities!]

Stukeley’s Wicker Man

A supposed rite of pagan human and animal sacrifice to ensure the fertility of the harvest.

The evidence for the Wicker Man is minimal, but for an antiquarian, William Stukeley in the 17th century, and some very brief mentions in Roman author(s) writing about the Druids. The Celtic connection with all this goes back again to the 17th and particularly 18th centuries and the reinvention of Celtic identity in Scotland, Wales, Ireland and France …

All this is actually nicely dealt with in the movie!

And bonfires are nevertheless well attested rites going way back – plenty of archaeological remains of roast dinners at the entrance to chambered monuments.

more of the abandoned apartment in San Jose

[Link] [Link] [Link] [Link]

under the question – what does historical change look like?

Al Bergesen (in Tucson) sent me this picture of the New York Skyline

… my son is a photographer and took the attached image of the NY skyline. When I saw it I thought about how we see NY after 911, or maybe even more generally given the rise of China and the skylines emerging there.

Here is my thought: most images of NY are still of tall buildings; still full of energy, etc. Fine. That is still NY. But there is also a sadness about the city that is not captured in the traditional image. NY after the shock of 911 + the rise of East Asia and its now tallest buildings in the world is part of a world historic transition from North America to East Asia and this photo captures some of the sense of the recession or decline of the US vis ? vis the rise of bustling Asia/China.

There is also a sadness here; a slipping away of the centrality of NY and its skyline. But there has been little photographic honesty about this social fact. We are all in photographic denial about the status of NY. We, like Bush, are full of the bluster of a NY of the past, and not the sadness and shift to Asia that is, in fact, the overwhelming reality of the 21st. century.

…

“NY drifting into memory”, was the caption I thought of when I saw it. Such distance; sadness; recession from centrality. Many won’t like that. Fine. But it would be fascinating to see the emotions that this particular image of the NY skyline will illicit.

Both the pictures and your comments remind me of a small town in Texas that I visited. My first impression was of a dying town. It isn’t on a main highway or interstate, it isn’t touristy in any way – the one thing the town actively “advertises” is that it is the birthplace of a famous country singer. The stores on the main street are empty (but still bearing the old signs painted on the windows), the hospital building is abandoned (but carefully locked), the movie theater, now closed, still has the signs up from the last film it showed, the streets and sidewalks when I visited were dead quiet, empty of people and of life, except the occasional car. The few residents I met were older people who had spent their whole lives there and, for sentimental reasons or financial reasons or because they were just to tired to manage, had decided not to move, even when the town emptied out of their relatives and all the young people and when their own generation began dying out. The town actually has a website with a calendar where town events can be listed, but as far back in time as you can search and as far forward as well, the only things listed are the standard American holidays.

There was a store on the main street (one of the two stores still open) that advertised itself as an antiques store. I can imagine where the store gets its merchandise, but I would love to know who the buying customers are. Nothing in the store was listed at more than fifty dollars. Old paperback mystery novels, plastic tea sets for having tea with dolls, American flag pins, used kitchen knives, bags of buttons, cookie jars in every shape and color imaginable, stuffed pigs … . Had I been alone in the store, I might have been “free” to laugh at certain items, sneer at others, or appreciate and examine the few objects that caught my fancy. But the store is owned and run by an elderly lady, a long-time resident of the town, and I felt embarrassed to be caught picking over the remnants of her hometown’s life, in spite of the fact that presumably this was what I was supposed to do as a customer in the store. Trying to evaluate and appreciate and understand a totally foreign object in front of someone who may know part or all of the object’s history is very unnerving. Initially I felt an overwhelming obligation to buy something as a gesture that I appreciated her merchandise. But in the end I was unable to buy anything. The objects for sale were disturbingly intimate in that they were part of “everyday” experience – an “everyday” with which I was familiar from visiting grandparents and elderly neighbors – and I couldn?t look at them, as I often look (though perhaps I shouldn?t) at objects in museums, without feeling awkward and intrusive. It was an entirely different experience of “viewing” than any I have ever known.

(Have a look at the 2002 meetings of the Association of American Geographers – [Link] [Link] [Link])

The notion of an archaeological imagination has become well established – a hard fought success for us. It appears as a main theme in Clive Gamble’s excellent book from Routledge - Archaeology: The Basics.

So what is the archaeological imagination?

The point is a simple one – archaeology is not just an academic discipline producing knowledge of the past. Archaeology is part of a range of values, aspirations, desires, dreams, attitudes, stories that share an archaeological character. Ideas that digging deeply into something establishes authenticity; a fascination with ruin and morbidity; locating senses of identity in remains of the past; connecting collection with place in the pursuit of historical meaning; notions of the sacred aura of the artifact; attitudes towards garbage and leftovers; the uncanny sense of presence found in material remains; stories of deep origin, and the cyclical rise and fall of cultures.

The archaeological imagination takes us into the heart of the modern condition and its relationship with the past.

From Alain Schnapp’s Discovery of the Past

David Lowenthal had gathered a fascinating compendium in his 1985 book The Past is a Foreign Country.

Julian has done a great job of exploring some of the philosphical aspects of the archaeological imagination, particularly in his studies of Heidegger [Link], and now in his new and first rate book on archaeology and modernity – [Link] Barbara Bender, Sue Hamilton and Chris Tilley have explored the archaeological imagination wonderfully in their excavations at Leskernick. There is much more – Ruth Tringham’s work out of Berkeley, Carmel Schrire in her research in South Africa. Gavin Lucas is pursuing the archaeological imagination in his fieldwork, and Ian Hodder here at Stanford has always been a great and active supporter of projects that pursue the edges of the archaeological. Cornelius Holtorf, another great colleague of mine at Lampeter, now in Sweden, is about to round off so much of this work with his fabulous forthcoming book on archaeology and popular culture.

And me? Well, since ReConstructing Archaeology, written with Chris Tilley back in the 80s, I have been plotting my own track through matters archaeological. From Adorno and Horkheimer’s ruined histories, Benjamin’s fragmented re-collections, to recent explorations at Stanford with Bill Rathje and David Platt [Link] I have always thought that my 1991 Experiencing the Past, seen by many as a heinous attack on the foundations of archaeological knowledge, was actually a useful summary of the archaeological imagination. Mike Pearson clarified a lot of my thinking on what we saw as a critical romanticism and poetics at the heart of the archaeological project in our Theatre/Archaeology [Link] [Link]. The remains of all this interest are scattered through this blog and my website, never mind numerous articles, books and conference sessions.

I am sounding defensive. Feeling a need to set the record straight. Why?

I got sent an invitation to a book launch in London for Jennifer Wallace’s recently published Digging the Dirt: The Archaeological Imagination. The book is not yet out in the US. I ordered a copy from the UK and read it this evening.

It is a good read. Covers the themes I have just outlined in a lively way with lots of references to literature and some history of archaeology. She has clearly come across our work – Hodder, Rathje, Tilley and myself get mention in the section on further reading, and sometimes in the main text. One side of me is delighted that our work has reached beyond archaeology.

But for the most part Jennifer has chosen to ignore twenty years of analysis of the archaeological imagination, the archaeological condition.

I wonder why.

Maybe because her book is a literary reading of “the archaeological imagination”. Yet she liberally discusses archaeological history (totally omitting Alain Schnapp’s marvellous and standard book Discovery of the Past), excavations, and what she sees as current trends in the discipline.

Maybe she just hasn’t done her homework, reading what has come before her.

Maybe her publisher, Duckworth, didn’t want footnotes or bibliography – they often look to a cross-over market between academic research and broader interest.

Maybe it doesn’t matter – it’s only the ideas that count. Cornelius is always telling me to lighten up.

Am I getting to be an old reactionary shouting out the standards of scholarship? That you should always recognize the work of others. Perhaps I would simply have celebrated the book’s effort to cross disciplines – a very difficult task – if it wasn’t for an email sent round my department by Maud Gleason recently. She was calling for standards of citation and referencing to be reasserted and upheld in academia, because, like many, she is witnessing a growth in selective, thin and downright false citation – saying (or rather not saying) where your ideas have come from. The matter is really not one of standards for the sake of standards. Maud got me thinking about academic community.

Shoddy research and scholarship often hides behind the publisher’s desire to have a clean read without all the distraction of saying where your ideas come from. The pressure upon academics to deliver publication is considerable and I am suspicious that a lot of what Jennifer discusses is too familiar to be the result of convergent thinking – her coming from literary studies and the reception of classical heritage. And it does look good to appear to be the one with the insight to pull together the big picture.

There is a profound danger in the celebration of the individual that this sloppy work represents. This is what bothers me. The intellectual freedoms of academia depend upon us being a group of colleagues with standards, and principally standards that refuse to have our efforts divided. Say where your ideas come from because linking them with others makes them stronger and lends them impact. Plagiarism is a threat becasue it divides; it hides the connections between people and their ideas. (Though I am not accusing Jennifer of plagiarism.) All too many people want to promote division and dissent because it weakens the power of ideas to change – ideas become simply the possession or opinion of one detached academic.

Jennifer Wallace – you should have connected your work with the efforts of others that you clearly know of. Because these are not just entertaining stories. They go to the heart of the contemporary world’s sense of history, of identity, of direction. They matter.

The power of independent research and criticism lies not in the abilities of an individual, but in the collective effort, collegiality, and democracy, the community of scholarship that alone can give force.

How about that for an enlightenment ideal!

The Graflex Pacemaker Speed Graphic arrived this morning.

Weegee used a Graflex in New York.

They are big 4″x5″ field cameras. In your face cameras.

I got this one on eBay from an estate sale. It was bought in 1947 and belonged to William A. Blind of 137 East 13 Street, Casper, Wyoming. He had converted an old leather suitcase into a carrying case. Everything was untouched from maybe the late 50s. It all smells strange – a combination of the camera materials and the room or attic where the camera was kept … and William A. Blind. There is an unexposed film pack, a lot of paperwork (instructions, guides, notes he kept, the original guarantee), and six negatives. It looks as if he took copies of his 1957 driver’s license and medical card, and then finished a length of film on someone he knew …

He was born in 1911, was 5 feet 4 inches tall, drove a grey 1956 four door Oldsmobile, and this photograph has probably never been printed before …

A new movie – Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow – uses old footage of Olivier, with dubbed voice, as the villainous leader of killer robots threatening civilization.

The style, judging from the trailer, is wonderfully retro and noir – looks very reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis

Daily Telegraph | News | Ice Maiden triggers mother of all disputes in Siberia

This story has it all.

High in the Altai mountains of southern Siberia, where Shamans still practise their ancient rites and most people are descended from Asiatic nomads, there is a whiff of revolt in the air.

Local officials, urged on by the increasingly militant electorate, are collecting signatures, writing petitions and demanding audiences with regional political leaders.

Their demands are simple and have nothing to do with the inept rule, poverty, corruption and ecological disasters dogging the region.

They want a 2,500-year-old mummy, found by Russian archaeologists 11 years ago and being studied in the Siberian capital of Novosibirsk, to be reinterred without delay.

Egged on by powerful shamans who local people believe act as go-betweens with the heavenly spirits, they say only the mummy’s reburial will put an end to a rash of earthquakes and other problems assailing the region.

The mummy in question is an archaeological jewel. When her ornately tattooed body was found entombed in ice in an ancient burial chamber, the find was acclaimed as one of the most important in Russia’s recent history.

The Ice Maiden, as she was dubbed, had survived almost intact in the permafrost of the southern Siberian mountains, surrounded by a burial sacrifice of six horses in gilt harnesses.

Now the battle lines over her future are being drawn up. The fight pits modern Russian science against the ancient beliefs of the Altai people who lived in the region for centuries before Russian colonisers arrived 300 years ago.

It is also at the heart of strained relations between Moscow, often seen as high-handed and out of touch, and the many indigenous peoples of Russia, growing in self-confidence and demanding ever-greater autonomy even as President Vladimir Putin seeks to rein them in.

The archaeological archetypes – mummies uncannily preserved, primitivist pitted against rationalist attitudes, shamen and ancient curses, intimate past-present relationships, a politically charged material past, senses of contemporary identity – components that give a local dispute global reach. Add to this the issue of ethnographic analogy in academic archaeology – the comparison of cultures past with the contemporary ethnographic record – my colleague Chris Tilley got into Siberian shamen when dealing with nordic bronze age rock art.

[Link] [Link] [Link] [Link] [Link]

Ralph Waldo Emerson: English Traits, Stonehenge: “We walked in and out, and took again and again a fresh look at the uncanny stones.” (1856).

The Uncanny?

The return of what is no longer the same.
For Freud, a return of the repressed. [Here is an extract.]

The hauntingly familiar – strange, but reminiscent.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992). Dracula has arrived in London. He contrives a meeting, accidentally in the street, with Mina, having recognised her back home in Transylvania from Harker’s photograph. She hesitates to show him the new science of the cinematograph. Mina to the Count – “Who are you? – I know you”. His reply – ” I have crossed oceans of time to find you”. The recognition, after centuries, and through metempsychosis, that she was once his lover; his loss; and rediscovery.

Sublime horror.

The uncanny is disruption – of time; a fracturing, splitting, or doubling of subjectivity; a deconstructive repetition-with-a-difference.

The images above are from Nigel Kneale’s (Quatermass and The Pit) classic but little known “Stone Tape” (1972, directed Peter Sasdy, now available from the British Film Institute). A team of scientists discover a room in a Gothic mansion that is haunted by the recordings (in the very stone fabric) of events layered back into millennia, back to a prehistoric megalithic and horrific experience.

For Steven King the uncanny is (similarly) haunted real estate.

The unhomelike – Das Unheimliche. Unheimlichkeit, the uncanny, breaks down roughly into “un-home-like-ness.”

The streets of London.

With the archaeological uncanny comes that abhorrence of the positive that I was talking about on Friday. We should think of a negativity that requires a recognition of the discontinuity of the past and the paradox of the double.

Doppelganger. Dorian Gray. How would you recognize your double? Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) – they arrive in San Francisco from outer space. People take the strange new flowers home, and when they sleep alien doubles take their place. Doubles may be zombies. automata or cyborgs. We fear the artificial alter-ego. The Uncanny is at the heart of the ethics of biotechnology and cloning. Never mind AI.

And the double that is the photograph. (But it never really looks like you – or it photogenetically reflects you in better light.) The hyper-realist sculpture. George Segal’s figures. A sense of déjà vu.

The Uncanny is the simulacrum – an exact copy of an original that never existed. BMW’s new Mini.

Tzvetan Todorov connects the uncanny, the fantastic, and the marvelous. He defines the fantastic as a genre which generates hesitation in the reader’s mind. He asserts the necessity of three conditions for the fantastic: the reader must hesitate between a natural and supernatural interpretation, a character usually represents this hesitation and the reader adopts a nonallegorical reading. We are in liminal spaces. In Coppola’s Dracula, Mina meets the Count at a showing of the new “movies” – uncanny science. She hesitates, but accepts his offer of joining him in the un-dead. Lover and monster. She hesitates in his murder. Recognition, after hesitation, of the double. Precisely.

Giorgio de Chirico worked on the silence, solitude and obscurity of deserted Italian piazze, urban landscapes – a curious amalgam of aesthetic sentiment and psychic distress. He preferred to use the word “presentiment”, but his confusion of animate and inanimate – he described statues in public places as particularly evocative because they seemed to have the potential to rise and enter the world of men, especially at twilight – is precisely what Freud had described as the primary criterion for the generation of the Uncanny.

Never feeling at home in the world – Novalis on philosophy (if my memory serves right). This is archaeology.

Dr Samson Perera, a dental biologist at Leeds University UK, murdered his adopted daughter, Nilanthie, in 1985 and buried the dismembered body around the house and garden. Not all the remains have been recovered.

Horror as the underside of everyday life. The secret histories and lives of things and places.

David Lynch has made a career out of this. I think of the opening scenes of his movie Blue Velvet and the severed ear found on a suburban front lawn in small town America.

Fred and Rosemary West in small town England and their serial killings intimately connected with home improvements – a new kitchen floor for the latest victim.

We are often fascinated by the histories of houses and the ghosts, sinister or appealing, of lives passed within, of events witnessed. My good friend David Austin fronted a BBC series called the House Detectives where a team of archaeologists and architectural historians visited houses to unlock their hidden pasts.

Things that were once lost or hidden uncovered. The underside of everyday life. What mundanity can hide or become. Locale as scene of crime. These are archaeological vectors of metamorphosis and disclosure/manifestation.