Archive and Archaeological Economy

The concept of the archive came to me at different moments whilst I was investigating archaeology under the Estado Novo dictatorship in Portugal (1933–1974). In this research, I experienced archives “as a source” and “as a subject”. They were “a source” in the sense that archives were the “places” where I could find the raw materials to develop my work. They were “a subject” because, in picking up and ordering documents, I was constructing a “landscape” through which I was setting a research path; a “landscape” offering me clues and suggesting directions I hadn’t envisaged at the outset. This experience, the way archives were questioning me, led me to read Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever (1998) to try to understand this experience. Derrida shows us the archive as a place of two principles: the principle of commencement, since the archive is the place of physical, historical or ontological origin; and the principle of commandment, because the archive is also the place from which laws are exercised. This made sense to me because I was experiencing archives both as a source and as a subject, a place of “origins” (of documents) and “laws” (to re-organize my research). But, more importantly, with Derrida’s notion of the archive, I realized how this experience of using archives in doing “history of archaeology” was so close to the experience of doing archaeology itself, and how Derrida’s work could be read while thinking about the conditions under which we do archaeology. This perspective on Derrida’s work became clearer after reading Gavin Lucas’ Understanding the Archaeological Record (2012) where Lucas argues archives can be discussed as a translation process based on the interaction between “the site” and “the copy” (ibid.: 237–239). In this paper, I aim to look in detail at the intertwining of Derrida and Lucas’ ideas, with a view to discussing the limits and possibilities of the ways we shape our “archaeological economy” (ibid.: 231).

Author - Gomes, Sérgio, Porto, Portugal (Presenting author)