Radical Stratigraphy: A Century of Los Angeles Graffiti

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology Out-of-the-Box: Investigating the Edge of the Discipline" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

For the past 100 years, an alternative written record has been tied to the underbelly of Los Angeles’ built environment. The urban infrastructure of railroads, bridges, storm drain tunnels, harbors, and paved rivers houses a vernacular history inscribed mostly on concrete with rocks, chalk, charcoal, pencil, and sometimes railroad tar. Combining elements of ethnography and archaeology, my work examines several phenomenological aspects of graffiti: its deeply sited nature, its radical condensation, and its indexical tie to absent authors. As Los Angeles’ urban landscapes developed over the course of a century, groups as diverse as hobos, children, gay men, and blue collar workers have used graffiti to craft a radical stratigraphy that upends conventional ways of writing history. As illicit material representations, graffiti marks cement ties between landscape, cultural memory, and social life. A new point of theoretical transfer between archaeology and cultural anthropology, the analysis of graffiti provides new fodder for the archaeological turn within anthropology (Dawdy 2010), and for continued attention to the excavation of the present and recent past (González-Ruibal 2008). Graffiti creates alternative narratives about chronology and categorization, and about how people create knowledge in place.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeology Out-of-the-Box: Investigating the Edge of the Discipline   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22777