- Concepts of Time, Gestures, Solidfluids, Anthropocene, Climate Change, Glaciology, and 21 moreArchaeology, Anthropology, Interdisciplinarity, Psychology, Sociology, History, Philosophy, Cultural Studies, Social Sciences, Gender Studies, Architecture, Biology, Environmental Sustainability, Geography, Sustainable Development, Gender, Design, Languages and Linguistics, Physics, Ecology, and Educationedit
This edited volume seeks to explore and shape ways of thinking about the earth, bodies and materials through surfaces. It argues that to encounter the social by way of surfaces has the potential to transgress settled boundaries of matter... more
This edited volume seeks to explore and shape ways of thinking about the earth, bodies and materials through surfaces. It argues that to encounter the social by way of surfaces has the potential to transgress settled boundaries of matter and meaning and to emphasise the ways by which life becomes and grow. The collection emphasises the transformational capacities of surfaces by folding together ten contributions across five continents and seven countries in correspondence with the scientific practices of archaeology, neuroscience and psychology, the creative practices of architecture and design, the skilled crafts of basketry, bookbinding, knitting and taxidermy, and the ritual practices of fertility and mortuary cult.
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Sentient Conceptualisations is about how scientists studying the past understand time in relation to space. Simonetti argues that the feelings for depths and sur- faces, arising from the bodily movements and gestures of scientific... more
Sentient Conceptualisations is about how scientists studying the past understand time in relation to space. Simonetti argues that the feelings for depths and sur- faces, arising from the bodily movements and gestures of scientific practice, strongly influence conceptualisations of space and time. With an anthropological eye, Simonetti explores the ways archaeologists and those from related disci- plines develop expert knowledge in varied environments. The book draws on ethnographic work carried out with Chilean and Scottish archaeologists, working both on land and underwater, to analyse in depth the visual language of science and what it reveals about the relation between thinking and feeling.
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Concrete is a material that substantiates key contradictions of contemporary urban life. This anthropic rock, the most abundant in earth history, not only materializes modern narratives of progress but is currently a candidate to mark the... more
Concrete is a material that substantiates key contradictions of contemporary urban life. This anthropic rock, the most abundant in earth history, not only materializes modern narratives of progress but is currently a candidate to mark the onset of the Anthropocene. Moreover, contrary to how it has been traditionally portrayed by the industry, as a synthetic product of modern ingenuity, concrete results from a deep planetary relationship between the Earth and the Sun; the very same relationship that has made the existence of life in this planet, as we know it, possible, including humans. Attending to contemporary dystopias of Chile’s neoliberal experiment in Santiago, this chapter addresses the importance of the relationship between sunlight and concrete for understanding the human condition in the Anthropocene.
Research Interests: Anthropology, Medical Anthropology, Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Social and Cultural Anthropology, and 15 moreEnvironmental Anthropology, Architectural History, Architectural Theory, Environmental Sustainability, Sustainable Architecture, Cultural Anthropology, Anthropocene studies, History of architecture, New Materialism, Antropología Social, Antropología, Anthropocene, New Materialisms, Anthropological Theory, and Feminist new materialism
El concreto o hormigón es el material que más significativamente marca el habitar humano en estos tiempos de crisis ecológica. No solo su producción contribuye directamente al calentamiento global, sino que, al mismo tiempo, es el... more
El concreto o hormigón es el material que más significativamente marca el habitar humano en estos tiempos de crisis ecológica. No solo su producción contribuye directamente al calentamiento global, sino que, al mismo tiempo, es el material antrópico más abundante de la historia del planeta y, por tanto, un candidato para marcar el origen estratigráfico del Antropoceno: una nueva época geológica propuesta para identificar a lo humano como fuerza geológica dominante. Sin embargo, el hormigón ha contribuido simultáneamente a materializar, más que ninguna otra sustancia, las aspiraciones que la modernidad ha buscado levantar contra la naturaleza, trazadas por tensiones entre aquello natural y artificial, geológico y humano, orgánico e inorgánico, sólido y fluido. Este artículo esboza estas tensiones con el objetivo de repensar la narrativa de trascendencia de la modernidad, para señalar que el concreto distaría mucho de ser una sustancia puramente sintética, suspendida más allá de las transformaciones materiales de la historia de la tierra. Abrazar la historia geológica de materiales de construcción como el concreto ofrece nuevos horizontes para la arquitectura y su educación, sensibles a los desafíos que la crisis ambiental impone a la humanidad.
Research Interests: Anthropology, Architecture, Material Culture Studies, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Urban Planning, and 15 moreArchitectural History, Urban Studies, Urbanism, Architectural Theory, Environmental Sustainability, Environmental Humanities, Anthropocene studies, Urban Design, New Materialism, Arquitetura e Urbanismo, Architecture and urbanism, Teoria História e Crítica da Arquitetura e do Urbanismo, Anthropocene, New Materialisms, and Culture and the Anthropocene
We are live in room number 2022 of the venerable International Court of Stratigraphic Arbitration where two esteemed scholars—an archaeologist and an anthropologist— appeared before the jury. On trial is the question whether concrete, the... more
We are live in room number 2022 of the venerable International Court of Stratigraphic Arbitration where two esteemed scholars—an archaeologist and an anthropologist— appeared before the jury. On trial is the question whether concrete, the unparalleled material, is indeed an admissible marker for defining the onset of the Anthropocene. Here is a record of the first day of the hearing.
Research Interests: Archaeology, Anthropology, Historical Archaeology, Architecture, Landscape Archaeology, and 15 moreSocial and Cultural Anthropology, Environmental Anthropology, Urban Planning, Architectural History, Urban Studies, Contemporary Archaeology, Architectural Theory, Archaeological Theory, Sustainable Architecture, Cultural Anthropology, Anthropocene studies, Arquitectura, Arquitetura e Urbanismo, Anthropocene, and Anthropological Theory
This issue opens an inquiry into the tension between solidity and fluidity. This tension is ingrained in the Western intellectual tradition and informs theoretical debates across the sciences and humanities. In physics, solid is one phase... more
This issue opens an inquiry into the tension between solidity and fluidity. This tension is ingrained in the Western intellectual tradition and informs theoretical debates across the sciences and humanities. In physics, solid is one phase of matter, alongside liquid, gas and plasma. This, however, assumes all matter to be particulate. Reversing the relation between statics and dynamics, we argue to the contrary, that matter exists as continuous flux. It is both solid and fluid. What difference would it make were we to start from our inescapable participation in a world of solid fluids? Is solid fluidity a condition of being in the midst of things, or of intermediacy on a solid-fluid continuum? Does the world appear fluid in the process of its formation, but solid when you look back on things already formed? Here we open new paths for theorizing matter and meaning at a time of ecological crisis.
Research Interests: Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology, History of Science, Environmental Anthropology, Materialism, and 14 moreCultural Materialism, Dialectical Materialism, Materiality (Anthropology), Historical Materialism, Environmental Humanities, Memory and materiality, Marxist and Materialist Feminism, Materialities, New Materialism, Materiality, Material Culture & Materiality, Speculative Materialism, New Materialisms, and Feminist new materialism
A tension between solidity and fluidity tends to divide the sciences and the humanities along lines that define what is hard and soft in knowledge. This divide relates to similar dichotomies, between exteriority and interiority, material... more
A tension between solidity and fluidity tends to divide the sciences and the humanities along lines that define what is hard and soft in knowledge. This divide relates to similar dichotomies, between exteriority and interiority, material and spiritual, homogeneity and heterogeneity, matter and form, all of which have been partially mapped in Western thinking onto a traditional separation between earth and sky. Yet particular forms of knowledge sit uneasily within these tensions, a paradigmatic example of which is an understanding of solids as 'viscous fluids'. This article explores the concept of viscosity, attending to how it has impacted on understandings of matter, as well as broader social and cultural issues. It does so, particularly, by looking into the scientific study of ice, a material that has historically been regarded as solidfluid, to argue that life and sociality remain possible only in so far as matter that is viscid allows solid and fluid states to mingle.
Research Interests: Glaciology, Anthropology, Glacial Geology, Social and Cultural Anthropology, History of Science, and 15 moreMetaphysics of Time, Time Studies, Materialism, Cultural Materialism, History of Geology, Dialectical Materialism, Historical Materialism, History of Human Sciences, Social Studies Of Science, Time Perception, New Materialism, Viscosity, Speculative Materialism, New Materialisms, and Feminist new materialism
In our discussions around the theme of solid fluids, we often resort to everyday words, many of them of ancient derivation and rich in association. We have decided to make a list of some of the words that come up most often-barring those... more
In our discussions around the theme of solid fluids, we often resort to everyday words, many of them of ancient derivation and rich in association. We have decided to make a list of some of the words that come up most often-barring those that already figure as the principal characters of individual contributions-and to distribute among ourselves the task of writing a sort of mini-biography for each. The resulting lexicon with 19 entries, ranging from 'cloud' and 'concrete' to 'wave' and 'wood', serves as a conclusion to the collection as a whole.
Research Interests: Materialism, Cultural Materialism, Dialectical Materialism, Materiality (Anthropology), Historical Materialism, and 10 moreMateriality of Art, Memory and materiality, Marxist and Materialist Feminism, Materialities, New Materialism, Materiality, Material Culture & Materiality, Speculative Materialism, New Materialisms, and Feminist new materialism
The Anthropocene-term proposed by the scientific community for the current geological epoch to signal humans as a leading geological force in earth history-has open intense debates across the sciences and humanities, in that the... more
The Anthropocene-term proposed by the scientific community for the current geological epoch to signal humans as a leading geological force in earth history-has open intense debates across the sciences and humanities, in that the traditional gap between natural and social phenomena, occurring respectively at slow and fast temporal rates, have been questioned. Despite the enthusiasm, an irre-solvable conceptual limitation marks the term. Irrespective of the very heterogene-ity-human and other-than-human-that is currently at risk in this new epoch, the term often refers to a universal male human, sitting above nature. Humans are to be found simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, which risks diluting environmental responsiveness. This global dilemma resonates with the epistemic distance on which knowledge of the Anthropocene is constituted, which requires achieving a cosmic view on earth at the expense of ecological intimacy. Such cosmic view resonates, in turn, with the place the built environment affords humans, as ex-habitants of the earth. Yet, life-human or any other-is not lived on the exterior of a globe but in the Earth, nurtured by sensory attunements to the material transformations of an environment in constant becoming. Acknowledging the immanence of life, this chapter argues, requires a redefinition of what it means to be human. It is through this immanence that environmental responsiveness remains possible in a world in crisis. The chapter concludes by distinguishing responsibility from responsivity, two contrasting modes of engaging with environmental change, defined respectively as a retrospective act resulting from the achievement of epistemic distance and a forward-looking capacity related to knowing intimately the ongoing transformations of the environment.
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El Antropoceno —término acuñado recientemente para designar a la época geológica ac- tual— se enmarca en la pregunta por el impacto de lo humano a escala planetaria. Dirigido al mismo tiempo a todos y a nadie, el Antropoceno pareciera... more
El Antropoceno —término acuñado recientemente para designar a la época geológica ac- tual— se enmarca en la pregunta por el impacto de lo humano a escala planetaria. Dirigido al mismo tiempo a todos y a nadie, el Antropoceno pareciera interpelar a un humano global, imposible de hallar en ninguna parte. Dicha narrativa coincidiría con la tendencia general de la ciencia moderna en torno a un distanciamiento epistémico de la naturaleza. Esta na- rrativa entraría en tensión con el modo en que el conocimiento geológico se funda. Partien- do de trabajo etnográfico con geólogos involucrados en la extracción de caliza —ingredien- te central en la producción de cemento, el aglutinante del concreto— este artículo reflexiona sobre el modo en que aquellos expertos en historia de la tierra son afectados por las trayec- torias de los materiales que estudian. Contrario a la desafección que la imagen del Antro- poceno comporta, este trabajo muestra cómo geólogos —al igual que los ingenieros y mi- neros con los que colaboran— tienden a resonar afectivamente con las trayectorias de los materiales que estudian. Esto coincidiría con el modo en que los geólogos se refieren a las propiedades de la tierra, haciendo referencia al cuerpo, lo cual se remontaría a los inicios de la disciplina, dando cuenta de una intimidad epistémica entre tierra y cuerpo en el conoci- miento geológico.
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Important sciences conceptualise their practice as an exploration into a hidden past, removing surfaces downwardly, in response to their prior vertical accumulation. Common initially to the geosciences, this view has been adopted through... more
Important sciences conceptualise their practice as an exploration into a hidden past, removing surfaces downwardly, in response to their prior vertical accumulation. Common initially to the geosciences, this view has been adopted through the twentieth century by the humanities and social sciences. Drawing on ethnographic work with scientists who excavate the past with an analysis of the visual language of disciplines that adopt a stratigraphic view of time – including anthropology, history, psychology, philosophy and neurology – this chapter traces key debates in the history of science, showing how knowledge came to be enclosed by surfaces, providing a frame for discussion amongst rival approaches.
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The Anthropocene is seen by many scholars across the sciences and the humanities as a tool for political action. Yet the validation process for this term appears to be extremely conservative. According to geologists' leading efforts to... more
The Anthropocene is seen by many scholars across the sciences and the humanities as a tool for political action. Yet the validation process for this term appears to be extremely conservative. According to geologists' leading efforts to formalize the term, signals need to petrify in stratigraphic sequences in order to become candidates to mark the start of the Anthropocene. I argue that this emphasis results from a fossilized view of becoming, where time is seen as a punctuated accumulation of solid surfaces that are accessible only in retrospect. I show that this petrified view of change relates to a tendency to divorce earth and sky, which currently divides the practices of humanities scholars and geologists, as well as those of earth system scientists and stratigraphers collaborating on the formalization of the Anthropocene. Challenging this tendency, I conclude, requires opening up earth's history to the more-than-solid flows of environmental change.
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As the scientific distinction between climate and weather suggests, knowledge about climate is supposed to be beyond indigenous people's everyday experience of the environment in that it requires a long-term record. Based on ethnographic... more
As the scientific distinction between climate and weather suggests, knowledge about climate is supposed to be beyond indigenous people's everyday experience of the environment in that it requires a long-term record. Based on ethnographic work among geoscientists in Scotland and West Greenland, I show that practitioners of this discipline have mastered the craft of turning 'visible' what is 'invisible' to the senses by playing with shorter time scales. In thinking and communicating about the past, geoscientists would compress and accelerate long-term environmental processes, often at the cost of dissociating them from processes occurring at shorter timescales, particularly the adaptation of living organism. Attending to the historical circumstances around the development of this skill, I argue that it relates to an ideal of objectivity in science that corresponds with an optical understanding of time, inspired by the image of the telescope. Challenging the distinction between climate and weather, and the epistemic distance on which it rests, I discuss recent approaches in environmental anthropology that uncritically have adopted this distinction to distinguish indigenous knowledge of the environment from climate science. Attending to research with indigenous peoples of the Arctic, I conclude by speculating on alternative ways of understanding climate knowledge, beyond the climate-weather distinction.
Research Interests: Climate Change, Climate Change Adaptation, Adaptation to Climate Change, Climate change policy, Environmental History, and 15 moreEnvironmental Anthropology, History of the Senses, Climate, Philosophy of Time, Climate Change Adaptation And Mitigation Strategies, Environmental Sustainability, Anthropology of the Senses, Time Perception, Political Ecology (Anthropology), Climate Change Impacts, Climate Justice, Anthropocene, The Senses, Climate change adaptation measures, and Climate Politics
Notions of scale in prehistoric archaeology mingle with optical views of time and space, borrowed from astronomy’s expansion of the universe, on which early modern geology modeled its expansion of earth’s history. Optical tropes would be... more
Notions of scale in prehistoric archaeology mingle with optical views of time and space, borrowed from astronomy’s expansion of the universe, on which early modern geology modeled its expansion of earth’s history. Optical tropes would be sustained by traditional Western ocularcentrism, which modern philosophy enhanced after partially mistrusting and subsequently empowering the senses using optical technology. In this narrative, access to long-term processes comes at the cost of everyday perception, which has historically created tensions between prehistoric archaeology and disciplines working at shorter time-scales, including anthropology and history. Nonetheless, time concepts in archaeology speak only of a partial departure from sensory experience.
Research Interests: Archaeology, Prehistoric Archaeology, Anthropology, Social Anthropology, Landscape Archaeology, and 11 moreSocial and Cultural Anthropology, History of Science, Archaeological Method & Theory, STS (Anthropology), Archaeological Theory, Social Studies Of Science, Cultural Anthropology, Arqueología, History of Archaeology, Teoría Arqueológica, and Antropología
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The development of timber structures for tall buildings is a strategic measure to reduce the environmental impact of the construction industry, in view of a demand for housing that is expected to surge by 2030
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Recent environmental changes have sparked off unprecedented dialogues between practitioners of the earth sciences and the humanities – dialogues which defy some of the basic assumptions underpinning western science. However, a gap still... more
Recent environmental changes have sparked off unprecedented dialogues between practitioners of the earth sciences and the humanities – dialogues which defy some of the basic assumptions underpinning western science. However, a gap still persists between natural scientists and scholars in the humanities in their tendency to concentrate respectively on solid matter and fluid meaning. This article seeks to close this gap by paying attention to glacial ice and concrete, materials often taken to mark, respectively, the onset and culmination of human history. Historically, ice and concrete have been regarded as solid fluids. We argue, however, that both are caught in a punctuated understanding of change that turns fluidity and solidity into mutually exclusive properties, thus rendering the solid fluid as an oxymoron. The article concludes by comparing this " oxymoronic syndrome" with the ways in which the Inuit of West Greenland experience their cryogenic landscapes as nurturing environments in constant becoming.
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In this choral essay we, an assorted group of academics interested in inorganic life and matter, explore a mode of thinking and feeling with our objects of inquiry-chemicals, waste, cement, gas, and the "project" as a particular form of... more
In this choral essay we, an assorted group of academics interested in inorganic life and matter, explore a mode of thinking and feeling with our objects of inquiry-chemicals, waste, cement, gas, and the "project" as a particular form of circulation and enactment of materials and things. To experiment with alternative modes of knowing, we went to Pu-chuncaví, the largest, oldest, and most polluting industrial compound in Chile, to encounter the inorganic through and with its inorganicness and to attend to the situated, historicized, and political composition of both our materials and our experiences. Thinking of this as a collective provocation, we do not rehearse a conventional argument. Its parts are connected but only partially. There is no dramatic arc but rather an attempt at composing an atmosphere through which our thought and feelings are invoked. We have made visible the authorship behind each of the stories recounted here to celebrate the multivocality of our collaboration and to rehearse a nonabstracted mode of attention to Puchuncaví and the inorganic forces and entities we encountered there. We connect our irritations and speculations with the Anthropocene precisely as a way of summoning the multiple violences, many of them of planetary reach, that have to be denounced when situating our knowledge practices in Puchuncaví. Thinking about the ethico-political challenges of research in territories that have been, and are being, transformed under the weighty history of contamination and that are lived in and lived with by generations of beings (human and otherwise), we call in our concluding remarks for an enhanced pedagogy of care born of our inherited pasts and of engagement, interest, and becoming as response-ability.
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Scientists that rely on excavation for studying the past tend to conceptualize the passage of time vertically, as a movement from bottom to top. In the history of knowledge, this has not been an exclusive property of sciences that... more
Scientists that rely on excavation for studying the past tend to conceptualize the passage of time vertically, as a movement from bottom to top. In the history of knowledge, this has not been an exclusive property of sciences that excavate the past. Geological time had an impact on many other disciplines, some of which are far from the original source, with the result that various temporal processes became stratified, such as the evolution and growth of life, the mind, language, sociality and knowledge. By looking at the visual language of different disciplines, including evolutionary biology, linguistics, psychology, anthropology and history, I trace some key ramifications of the stratigraphic understanding of time. In doing so, I reveal important tensions that emerge as the stratigraphic view of time mixes with other temporal trajectories, such as the horizontality of the text, the verticality of hydraulic and arboricultural metaphors in genealogical thinking, as well as the sagittal temporality of the mind common in the west. The analysis provides insights into the corporeal and historical nature of disciplinary knowledge, across the sciences and the humanities, by suggesting that the way concepts of time evolve and circulate in academia is never independent of how scholars appropriate their environments corporeally.
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As novice archaeologists learn to project their attention beyond what is immediately visible on the ground, in the company of experts who support them by drawing their attention through gestures, they develop a capacity to feel forward... more
As novice archaeologists learn to project their attention beyond what is immediately visible on the ground, in the company of experts who support them by drawing their attention through gestures, they develop a capacity to feel forward into the absent properties of the landscape. A multisensory exercise, this capacity constitutes a movement not only to the future but also into a deeply buried past. This experience, common to the practice of excavation, has been recently questioned by the landscape approach and the archaeology of the contemporary past, which have invited practitioners to lift the past up to the surface. Unlike the traditional corporeal tendency to look downward, these approaches have encouraged archaeologists to raise their heads and walk the past, following the image of an unfolding horizon. This contrast suggests continuity between the ecology of movement and time con- cepts. I argue that concepts of time are not abstract entities, fixedly stored inside the mind, but sentient acts of conceptualization that depend on the dynamic field of forces in which things and people become entangled. As sentient conceptualizations, concepts are neither discovered nor constructed, but grow as archaeologists learn to find their ways through materials in a world in constant formation.
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Archaeology, like most sciences that rely on stratigraphic excavation for studying the past, tends to conceptualize this past as lying deep underneath the ground. Accordingly, chronologies tend to be depicted as a movement from bottom to... more
Archaeology, like most sciences that rely on stratigraphic excavation for studying the past, tends to conceptualize this past as lying deep underneath the ground. Accordingly, chronologies tend to be depicted as a movement from bottom to top, which contrast with sciences that illustrate the passage of time horizontally. By paying attention to the development of the visual language of disciplines that follow stratigraphy, I show how chronologies get entangled with other temporalities, particularly those of writing. Relying on recent ethnographic work with archaeologists, the analysis reveals that excavation emerges as a double vertical movement of downward destruction and upward reconstruction that coincides with a systematic dissociation of time and space that has important effects for the understanding of the formation of sites. I conclude by looking at some of the implications of this dissociation for contemporary theoretical discussions, particularly those that emerged after the phenomenological push to hor- izontalize the discipline. Challenging this dissociation, I argue that the conceptualization of time in science should be understood as a process that depends on the body and unfolds in movement.
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Resumen: La práctica arqueológica se caracteriza por un encuentro con las propiedades ausentes y presentes de los materiales en un mundo en constante cambio. Entender dichas propiedades depende del desarrollo de la habilidad de percibir... more
Resumen: La práctica arqueológica se caracteriza por un encuentro con las propiedades ausentes y presentes de los materiales en un mundo en constante cambio. Entender dichas propiedades depende del desarrollo de la habilidad de percibir más allá de lo visible a nivel de la superficie. Para llevar a cabo esto, los arqueólogos deben involucrarse multisensorialmente no sólo con las fluctuaciones del ambiente sino que, a su vez, hacer uso de su memoria e imaginación. Partiendo de trabajo etnográfico reciente, muestro que, a medida que los arqueólogos aprenden a excavar, la distinción entre aspectos preceptúales y no preceptúales no siempre se sigue. Aquí el recuerdo y la imaginación se desplegarían en una continuidad con el sentir, la cual emerge a medida que los arqueólogos se involucran en la historia del paisaje rastreando los pasos de otros. Esta experiencia desafía no sólo el entendimiento secuencial de la cognición sino que a su vez la visión puntillista de la producción del conocimiento. Desde una apertura sensorial a los aspectos presentes y ausentes de un mundo en constante cambio la tensión entre descubrimiento y construcción se disuelve.
Abstract: Archaeology is characterised by an encounter with both present and absent properties of materials in a constantly changing world. Understanding these properties depends on developing a capacity to perceive beyond what is visible on the surface. To do so, archaeologists have to multisensorially engage not only with the fluctuations of the environment but also make use of both memory and imagination. Grounded on recent ethnographic work, I show how the assumed distinction between perceptual and non-perceptual aspects of experience does not allow us to understand how archaeologists learn to dig. Remembering and imagining unfold in continuity with feeling, which emerges as archaeologists become part of the history of the landscape while tracing the footsteps of others. Such experience challenges not only the widespread sequential understanding of cognition but also the pointillist view of knowledge production. From a sensory openness to both present and absent properties of a world in constant formation, the tension between discovery and construction dissolves.
Abstract: Archaeology is characterised by an encounter with both present and absent properties of materials in a constantly changing world. Understanding these properties depends on developing a capacity to perceive beyond what is visible on the surface. To do so, archaeologists have to multisensorially engage not only with the fluctuations of the environment but also make use of both memory and imagination. Grounded on recent ethnographic work, I show how the assumed distinction between perceptual and non-perceptual aspects of experience does not allow us to understand how archaeologists learn to dig. Remembering and imagining unfold in continuity with feeling, which emerges as archaeologists become part of the history of the landscape while tracing the footsteps of others. Such experience challenges not only the widespread sequential understanding of cognition but also the pointillist view of knowledge production. From a sensory openness to both present and absent properties of a world in constant formation, the tension between discovery and construction dissolves.