Journal of Material Culture

According to Kellie Jones, reterritorialization involves ‘recapturing one’s (combined and various) history, much of which has been dismissed as an insignificant footnote to the dominant culture’. In this essay, I bring artist and photography scholar Deborah Willis’s use of Jones’s concept of reterritorialization to bear on Whispers from the Walls, an installation that Whitfield Lovell created at the University of North Texas Art Gallery in 1999. Chiefly, I explore what kinds and whose histories Whispers from the Walls engaged. In particular, I emphasize contributions that the photographs Lovell studied to create the installation and the objects he included therein made to recovering histories.

Our Sacred Sites, Contested Rites/Rights project (www.sacredsites.org.uk) examines physical, spiritual and interpretative engagements of today’s pagans with sacred sites, theorizes ‘sacredness’, and explores the implications of pagan engagements with sites for heritage management and archaeology more generally, in terms of ‘preservation ethic’ vis-a-vis active engagement. In this article, we explore ways in which ‘sacred sites’ - both the term and the sites - are negotiated by different interest groups, foregrounding our locations, as an archaeologist/art historian (Wallis) and anthropologist (Blain), and active pagan engagers with sites. Examples of pagan actions at such sites, including at Avebury and Stonehenge, demonstrate not only that their engagements with sacred sites are diverse and that identities - such as that of ‘new indigenes’ - arising therefrom are complex, but also that heritage management has not entirely neglected the issues. In addition to managed open access solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, a climate of inclusivity and multivocality has resulted in fruitful negotiations at the Rollright Stones.

It is argued that recent archaeological theories of death and burial have tended to overlook the social and mnemonic agency of the dead body. Drawing upon anthropological, ethnographic and forensic analogies for the effects of fire on the human body, together with Gell’s theory of the agency of inanimate objects, the article explores the cremation rites of early Anglo-Saxon England. As a case study in the archaeological study of the mnemonic agency of bodies and bones it is suggested that cremation and postcremation rites in the 5th and 6th centuries AD in eastern England operated as technologies of remembrance. Cremation encouraged distinctive forms of engagement with the physicality and materiality of the dead. It is argued that cremated bodies and ashes need to be theorized as more than osteological data, artefacts or symbolic resources, but as holding material agency influencing the selective remembering and forgetting of the deceased’s personhood.

This article looks at research carried out at the FBI Laboratory’s Special Photographic Unit in the identification of denim trousers from bank surveillance film. This research, which was published in 1998, showed that despite the ubiquity of jeans, each pair has individual identifying characteristics caused by the manufacturing process and by wear, and that these might be used as evidence in the identification of criminal suspects. What the FBI research also inadvertently illuminated was an otherwise hidden relationship between garment, maker and wearer, in an effective - if accidental - reversal of commodity fetishism.

Classical accounts of human evolution posit a progressive differentiation between the hands as instruments of rational intelligence and feet as integral to the mechanics of bipedal locomotion. Yet evolutionists were modelling pedestrian performance on the striding gait of boot-clad Europeans. The bias of head over heels in their accounts follows a long-standing tendency, in western thought and science, to elevate the plane of social and cultural life over the ground of nature. This tendency was already established among European elites in the practice of destination-oriented travel, the use of shoes and chairs, and the valorization of upright posture. It was further reinforced in urban societies through paving the streets. The groundlessness of metropolitan life remains embedded not only in western social structures but also in the disciplines of anthropology, psychology and biology. A more grounded approach to human movement, sensitive to embodied skills of footwork, opens up new terrain in the study of environmental perception, the history of technology, landscape formation and human anatomical evolution.