Yannis Hamilakis. Archaeology and the Senses: Human Experience, Memory, and Affect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, xiii + 255pp., 26 b/w figs., hbk, ISBN 978-0-521-83728-6)

Abstract

European Journal of Archaeology 18:4 (2015) 705-708 Review of Yannis Hamilakis. Archaeology and The Senses: Human Experience, Memory, and Affect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, xiii + 255pp., 26 b/w figs., hbk, ISBN Yannis Hamilakis provides a very different framework for incorporating the senses into the construction of the past using archaeological research – a framework that might be a challenge for those who understand the senses as a tool to enrichen and elaborate their interpretations and explanations of archaeological data. In this book Hamilakis turns on its head the traditional understanding of the senses as epiphenomena of more powerful forces that drive history by forefronting them as the driving forces in a history that is constructed as the affective, event-based, and practice-oriented construction about real people. To those who have read other works by Hamilakis, the clear explication of his anti-modernist anti-colonialist standpoint that is expressed from the outset will be familiar. But there are a number of aspects of his writing in this book that were new to me, including some very intimate and poetic narratives. However, the general thesis that he puts forward was not entirely unexpected, since I had heard and seen its prelude in his Afterword to Making Senses of the Past edited by Jo Day (Hamilakis, 2013). The book under review is called Archaeology and the Senses in order to draw away from the idea that it is an Archaeology of the Senses or a Sensorial Archaeology, which Hamilakis is at pains to repeat throughout the volume it definitely is not. He is quite explicit that this volume is not a proposal to create a new sub- discipline in archaeology. It is a proposal to look at what we do as archaeologists in a quite different way by enlisting sensorial experience. This would not be such a novel proposition, given the recent interest in phenomenology and sensorial experience in the broader fields of archaeology, anthropology, history and geography. But Hamilakis puts forward what seems to me a quite novel way of incorporating sensoriality into our interpretations of the past as well as what we do as archaeologists, and how we do it. What he writes here is relevant not just for archaeologists working in the field, but also cultural heritage and museum professionals. As he points out, whether we are speaking of the world of the past or present, ʻThere has always been a tension between the anarchic and messy world of the senses …, and the often politically motivated attempts by various people and groups to regulate and channel sensorial experience, often using material culture and physical and built space.ʼ (p.15). In Chapter 1, Hamilakis introduces this different approach to the senses. Many of the arguments of going beyond the strict boundaries of empirical observations of archaeological materials in order to build sensorial awareness of the past have been covered by contributions to Making Senses of the Past (Day 2013). Hamilakis’ aim is not to re-present the past but to evoke its presence (see page 6). After the fiery introductory chapter, Hamilakis starts his Chapter 2 with a genealogy of sensoriality in the context of western Modernism. ʻI show that the construction of the Western sensorium in modernity is embedded within the colonial and national nexus of power.. ʼ (p. 13). His aim is to provide the background to how western modernist archaeologists incorporated the five bodily senses into their research. This latter topic forms the second half of this chapter in which he traces how ʻthe official archaeological apparatusʼ separated the visual from the multi-sensorial experience and gave it a privileged focus, all as part of a project to regulate and control the uncontrollable senses, especially the ʻless remoteʼ ones