Archaeology and Art

Flor Trejo and Tânia Casimiro

Introduction

Archaeology is a purely intellectual activity. Nobody does archaeology for money, or power. It is about our lives. We are curious about who we are, where do we come from, what can we know, where are we going?

Archaeology should be an important part of our lives. A way to stay in contact with the persons that lived before us. Most people are fascinated by archaeology because it tells us stories of people like us, struggling, healing, hoping, fearing all that we cannot know. Their stories teach us that we are part of a long flow of generations, constantly dying and being born, and it is supposed to give sense to our lives in many different ways.

Giles Deleuze said that philosophy is not a tool to search for the truth, but a creative way of finding explanations for what there is. We believe that archaeology is a creative science that proposes explanations for what there was.

This section is intended as a space to share creative ways in which we can present archaeological finds to the public, scholarly and lay.  Ships are built, used, sailed, lost or abandoned, found, looted, surveyed, excavated, published, recovered, conserved, exhibited in museums, and they inspire almost everybody.

Poets, writers, playwrights, painters, sculptors, architects, craftsmen, all have been inspired at one time by these complicated floating machines, which can be seen as metaphors for curiosity, industry, harmony, and utopia.