I am interested in how modernity fails or goes wrong, how it produces ruins and rubbish. I study the confrontation between modernity and traditional cultures in Spain, Brazil and Ethiopia. Sometimes modernity wins (Spain, Brazil), sometimes loses (Ethiopia). In both cases, the fight creates archaeological landscapes – abandoned villages, houses, artifacts.

The critique of modernist narratives in archaeology has involved the deconstruction of evolutionary thinking, the colonialist implications of archaeological discourse and the bond between dubious Western projects (such as nationalism) and the study of the past, among other things. Nevertheless, apart from criticizing the foundations and political entanglements of our own discipline, the nefarious effects of modern utopias can be approached in other ways by archaeologists. We can look at the archaeological traces of rampant modernity: industrial ruins, abandoned villages and towns, refugee camps, concentration camps, prisons, battlefields, landfills, totalitarian architecture, mass graves, lands razed by nuclear disasters.

The ruins of modernity are filled with pain and trauma. An archaeology of the 20th century is an archaeology of suffering. It requires a particular way of telling and manifesting things, a particular way of seeing - an archaeological sensibility. _____________________________________________________________________

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Symmetrical Archaeology