Archaeologies of Memory and Identity

This session welcomes contributions that consider how the materiality of places, landscapes, remains and objects (in the past or in the present) both reflect and shape practices and experiences that produce identity and memory, especially the role of the material in producing sensory, affective and embodied experiences of memory and identification. Current thinking about the archaeology of the recent past challenges archaeological paradigms, advocating a new, ethnographic approach, centred on the meaning of the past and its remains in the present. We believe this work has opened up an exciting new space for discussion and debate about archaeological work concerned with memory and identity in the past and present - concerns which have always been a key focus of the practices we know as historical archaeology.