Digging the Dirt: The Archaeological Imagination

ISBN-13: 9780715632789 / Angielski / Miękka / 2004 / 220 str.

Jennifer Wallace

Opis

When Jennifer Wallace travelled round Greece as a student, hiking through olive groves to hunt out the stones of old temples and lost cities, she became fascinated by archaeology. It was magical. It was absurd. Give an archaeologist a few rocks and, like a master storyteller, he could bring another world to life. Give him a vague hunch about the past, and he was prepared to spend hours raking through the soil in search of proof. From the plain of Troy to the Titanic, and from Britain's Stonehenge to Ground Zero in New York, Digging the Dirt explores the excavation sites that have exerted the strongest pull on the public imagination. Some sites, in which bones are indistinguishable from dust, have driven archaeologists to despair. Other sites haunt poets with memories of loss and romance. All reveal the relevance of archaeology to our deepest cultural anxieties. Passionate and intelligent, Digging the Dirt engages with the work of philosophers and writers who have been stirred by the life below the ground, while never losing sight of the pressing demands of archaeologists today. In a world of postmodern spin, Wallace calls for a renewed sense of the poetics of depth and shows how ex

Recenzje

Digging the Dirt is an original foray into some of the reasons why archaeology fascinates us ... A fascinating progression through hearty parsonical barrow-diggers, body-snatchers, philosophers, savants, and poets - from Shelley and Wordsworth to Seamus Heaney ... The book is a fresh and engaging tussle with archaeology and the imagination. The Sunday Telegraph

Spis treści

List of Plates 1. The Poetics of Depth 2. Romancing Stones: The Archaeological Landscape 3. Unearthing Bodies: The Disruption of Hisyory 4. Fulfilling Desires: Erotic Excavation 5. Fundamentalism: Digging our Trojan Origins 6. Rock Bottom: Digging and Despair 7. Holy Ground: Archaeology and the Sacred8. Postmodern Archaeology: Trashing Our Future Notes on Reading Acknowledgements Index

O autorze

Jennifer Wallace is Director of Studies in English at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge, UK, author of Tragedy Since 9/11: Reading a World Out of Joint (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) and editor of A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). Her previous books include Digging the Dirt: The Archaeological Imagination (2004) and The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy (2007).