John Hejduk's Masque as a Mode of Archaeological Inquiry

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology/Architecture", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In 1980–1982, architect John Hejduk creates The Lancaster/Hanover Masque, a series of conceptual drawings accompanied by texts, in which he imagines the built environment and daily activities of a fictional community. Hejduk uses the “masque”, a form of English court pageantry popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as a mode of inquiry to explore and represent the interplay between the material conditions of human actions and their residues in the social landscape. Through this project, the architect constructs a narrative not unlike the work of archaeologists, anchored in a sense of temporal unfolding and materiality. Hejduk’s Masque invites us to interrogate how we construct historical narratives and, to that end, innovate new ways of bringing together material traces and textual fragments. This paper applies the methodology of the Masque to unpack archaeological narratives about daily life on sugar plantations of Antigua, in the Caribbean, throughout the colonial period.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023   •
• Archaeology/Architecture

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow