Memory and the Archaeological Imagination
September 30 @ 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm
A public talk by Dr. Christopher Witmore, Department of Classical & Modern Languages & Literatures, Texas Tech University
Location: Bodwell Area, Third Floor Collins Center for the Arts
Memory is commonly understood as a capacity of human subjects: the recollection of something absent, preserved as an image or representation in the mind. Archaeology suggests a different point of departure. Long before they are recalled, narrated, or commemorated, things persist. Buildings, surfaces, fragments, and lands retain—unevenly and incompletely—the differences made by their encounters with people, animals, weather, other materials, and the earth. Drawing upon archaeological encounters in Greece and northern Norway, this lecture approaches memory through material persistence, presence, indexical contact, suggestion, and untimeliness. It examines how things endure through transformation, retaining some relations while losing or redistributing others. Archaeological imagination emerges from this interplay of retention and forgetting: the disciplined practice of following material suggestions, associating fragments across gaps, and composing provisional accounts that remain responsive to the opacity and excess of things. Archaeology thus enables pasts otherwise to appear.
Christopher Witmore is Paul Whitfield Horn Distinguished Professor of Archaeology and Classics in the Department of Classical & Modern Languages & Literatures and an affiliated professor in Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work at Texas Tech University. An archaeologist concerned with what becomes of the past and what archaeology can contribute to life in the present, he works alongside objects, ruins, and lands to explore how things carry memories, gather different times, and disclose ways of living that written histories alone cannot recover. His fieldwork has taken him to Greece, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Romania, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
This event is part of the 2026-2027 McGillicuddy Humanities Center Symposium: MEMORY.
