1st Edition
Undoing Things How Objects, Bodies and Worlds Come Apart
List of Figures
List of Tables
List of Contributors
Chapter 1. Undoing Things: An Introduction (Gavin Lucas and Shannon Dawdy)
Section 1. Undoing Objects
Chapter 2. Decomposition: Book History Beyond the Book (Bill Brown)
Chapter 3. Letting be(come): Undoings at the Museum (Caitlin DeSilvey & Martin Grünfeld)
Chapter 4. Precarious Heritage and Weak Artifacts: the Doing and Undoing of the Polish Women’s Strike (Monika Stobiecka)
Chapter 5. Undoing and Entropy in the Archaeological Record (Gavin Lucas)
Chapter 6. The Doing in Undoing (Tim Ingold)
Section 2. Undoing Bodies
Chapter 7. Undoing Animals among the Classic Maya: Turtles, Deer and Monkeys (Sarah Newman)
Chapter 8. How to Assemble a Cross-Species History? Herders, Dams, Animal Younglings, and the Substance of Milk (Alice Yao)
Chapter 9. Undoing Animals and the Consequences; Abattoirs and Other Sources of Waste in 18th- and 19th-Century New Orleans (Susan D. deFrance)
Chapter 10. Undoing African American Human Remains (Alexandra Jones & Chip Colwell)
Section 3. Undoing Places
Chapter 11. Revenant Landscapes: Toxic Industrial Waste and the Archaeology of Slow Violence (Haeden Stewart)
Chapter 12. Geographies of Undoing (Alfredo González-Ruibal)
Chapter 13. Places Undone by Terrain (Gastón Gordillo)
Chapter 14. Before and after the Flood: Archaeological Sites and the Exploitation of Rivers in Northern Sweden (Mats Burström)
Chapter 15. The Politics of Precarity and the Undoing of Agricultural Expansion on the Medieval Deccan, Southern India (Andrew M. Bauer)
Section 4. Undoing Worlds
Chapter 16. Settler Ontocide (Severin Fowles)
Chapter 17. Recalcitrant Data and the Concept of Decline in the Archaeology of Plantation Sites (Geneviève Godbout)
Chapter 18. Death and the Maiden – Scars and the Mnemonics of Ruination (Jan Driessen)
Chapter 19. Archaeologies of Black Futurity: Sketches of Liberia’s Monuments and Ruins (Matthew C. Reilly, Caree A. Banton, Chrislyn Laurie Laurore, and Craig Stevens)
Chapter 20. Contemporary Doomsday Devices and the Undoing of End-Times (Shannon Lee Dawdy)
Index
Biography
Gavin Lucas is a Professor of Archaeology at the University of Iceland. He has had an enduring interest in the way archaeologists think and work, reflected in various books such as Critical Approaches to Fieldwork (2001), Understanding the Archaeological Record (2012), Writing the Past (2021), and Archaeological Situations (2022). Alongside this has been a recurrent interest in the concept of time: The Archaeology of Time (2005), Making Time (2020), and with Laurent Olivier, Conversations on Time (2021) while his main focus of fieldwork has been on the archaeology of the last 500 years.
Shannon Lee Dawdy is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Dawdy’s fieldwork combines archival, ethnographic, and archaeological methods. Her work has focused on the history of colonialism and capitalism, human-material relations, temporality, and the archaeology of contemporary life. Her books include Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans (2008), Patina: A Profane Archaeology (2016), and American Afterlives: Reinventing Death in the Twenty-First Century (2021).
