Eduardo Góes Neves
Eduardo Góes Neves
Professor of Archaeology
How can archaeologists visualize, document, and understand human manipulations of the environment that they can't see?
A team of archaeologists, scholars, scientists, architects and artists are combining field research with collaborative dialogue to consider the theoretical implications of unseen landscapes. |
This project seeks to uncover “invisible landscapes”—massive, multi-scalar, and multi-temporal human manipulations of the environment that archaeologists have long struggled to visualize, document, and understand. Since the advent of their discipline, archaeologists have occasionally caught glimpses of scattered anthropogenic interventions on otherwise seemingly undisturbed landscapes. Recent technological and methodological advances have revealed the previously unimagined scale and complexity of human impacts on those landscapes: enormous cities hidden beneath jungle canopies in the Americas and Southeast Asia, ubiquitous networks of sophisticated water management features that facilitated agriculture in Arabia, meticulously curated gardens in the “pristine” Amazonian rainforest. Bringing together a core team of three archaeologists and a dozen scholars, scientists, architects, and artists, this project investigates the causes behind the “invisibility” of such landscapes and offers potential ways to reimagine archaeologists' “sight.” More importantly, it also incites discussions about the theoretical implications of these previously unseen landscapes and about the new forms of disciplinary collaborations that their inspection demands. Combining field research with collaborative dialogue, the researchers aim not only to capture and analyze hitherto unseen complex anthropogenic assemblages, but to question what the objects of archaeology are and suggest possibilities regarding what they can be.
Professor of Archaeology
Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Social Sciences in the College
Associate Professor of Archaeology and the Ancient World and Egyptology and Assyriology