Tangible interventions: the lived landscapes of contemporary archaeology

Abstract

Drawing on the contrasting but mutually informative realities of present-day heritage politics of Argentina and Australia, this article explores the links between different cultural practices of preserving artefacts and the lived experience of the landscape. Central to the argument is that such a domain constitutes a specific form of materiality, a diverse field where social significance arises from a long process of entanglement of people with a lived landscape and the many transactions and durations that shaped it. This is explored through artefacts designed to contain ‘uncomfortable objects’, whose ownership cannot be easily located under Western law. Their second life as heritage results in ambiguous locations and valuations as these artefacts question the legitimacy of the available legal and cultural frameworks for their transferability. Together, the uncomfortable objects and the artefacts that contain them tangibly intervene in contemporary projects and concretize ‘past/present systems’, forming an empirical object constituted by mutually dependent terms of equal importance. Building upon conversations, observations and participation in community activities in both countries, the article argues for incorporating present-day encounters into the heart of archaeological analysis. The article follows the current search for hybrid methodologies to examine the contemporary settings of archaeological practice, yet it does so by insisting that the past is irreducible to present experiences.