The Archaeological Imagination Michael Shanks Stanford University Draf: for The Cambridge Handbook of the Imagination, edited by Anna Abraham, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming Archaeologists work with what remains Imagining past lives experienced through ruins and remains: telling the story of a prehistoric village through the remains of the site and its artifacts. And more: dealing with the return of childhood memories, or designing an archive for a corporation. The archaeological imagination is a creative capacity mobilized when we experience traces and vestiges of the past, when we gather, classify, conserve and restore, when we work with such remains, collections, archives to deliver narratives, reconstructions, accounts, explanations, or whatever. The archaeological imagination involves a particular sensibility, an afective attunement to the dynamic interplay of the presence of the past in remains, and the past’s absence, simultaneously witnessed by such remains. The archaeological imagination and its associated sensibility are intimately associated with the social and cultural changes of the evolution of modernity since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Thomas 2004), the growth, quite spectacular since the 1970s, of the Heritage Industry, that sector of the culture industry associated with the concept of heritage (Harrison 2013). Let me begin with how we understand archaeology. Archaeologists work with what remains. It is a common misconception, very much propagated in popular characterizations (Holtorf 2005, 2007), that archaeologists discover the past in their excavations and feldwork, and establish knowledge of the past in their laboratory science. This misconception is even supported in many academic accounts that, understandably, emphasize disciplinary practices (Renfrew and Bahn 2012). A pragmatic understanding of archaeological work or process, in contrast, stresses engagement, that archaeological work is a mode of production connecting past and present with a view to the future (Lucas 2001, Hodder 1999, Shanks and McGuire 1996, Rathje et al 2012, Olsen et al 2012, Preucel and Mrozowski 2012). There is a productive aspect to such work: remains are resources for constructing stories, accounts, exhibitions, academic papers, movies, artworks. And also a reproductive aspect: remains re-produce or reiterate the past, refreshing, introducing the past into the present, just as archaeologists may return to rework those remains with hindsight, in the light of new discoveries of sites and fnds, or in new models, with new theories. Shanks - The Archaeological Imagination 1