Archaeology and the Senses
Human Experience, Memory, and Affect

An exciting look at how archaeology has dealt with the bodily senses and how it can offer a richer glimpse into the human sensory experience.

Yannis Hamilakis (Author)

9780521837286, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 January 2014

270 pages, 26 b/w illus.
23.1 x 15.5 x 2.3 cm, 0.53 kg

'Anyone familiar with Hamilakis' output will recognise recurrent themes in this book: memory, personhood, commensality, reflexivity, politics and, of course, the senses. Pulling these topics together, the book represents a significant statement by one of the leading thinkers within archaeology.' Jo Day, Antiquity

This book is an exciting new look at how archaeology has dealt with the bodily senses and offers an argument for how the discipline can offer a richer glimpse into the human sensory experience. Yannis Hamilakis shows how, despite its intensely physical engagement with the material traces of the past, archaeology has mostly neglected multi-sensory experience, instead prioritising isolated vision and relying on the Western hierarchy of the five senses. In place of this limited view of experience, Hamilakis proposes a sensorial archaeology that can unearth the lost, suppressed, and forgotten sensory and affective modalities of humans. Using Bronze Age Crete as a case study, Hamilakis shows how sensorial memory can help us rethink questions ranging from the production of ancestral heritage to large-scale social change, and the cultural significance of monuments. Hamilakis points the way to reconstituting archaeology as a sensorial and affective multi-temporal practice.

1. Demolishing the museum of sensory ab/sense
2. Archaeology, modernity, and the senses
3. Recapturing sensorial and affective experience
4. Senses, materiality, time: a new ontology
5. Sensorial necro-politics: the mortuary mnemoscapes of Bronze Age Crete
6. Why 'palaces'? Senses, memory, and the 'palatial' phenomenon in Bronze Age Crete
7. From corporeality to sensoriality, from things to flows.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC], Social theory [JHBA], Sociology & anthropology [JH], Material culture [JFCD], Archaeological science, methodology & techniques [HDW], Social & cultural history [HBTB], History: theory & methods [HBA]