 Before I introduce the speaker, I would like to say the land acknowledgments that we agreed to say at our meetings here at ARC. The Archaeological Research Facility is located in Huichin, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Chochenyo-speaking Alone people, the ancestors of the historic and sovereign Verona band of Alameda County. We acknowledge that this land remains the great importance to the Alone people and that the ARC community in Paris is a history of archeological scholarship that has disturbed Alone ancestors and made attempts to erase living Alone people from the present and the future of this land. It is therefore our collective responsibility to critically transform our archeological inheritance and practice in support of Alone sovereignty and to hold the University of California accountable to the needs of all native indigenous people. And today we are very pleased to have Professor Yanis Hamilakis, currently from Brown University. As I said, we've tried like two or three years now, I think it's been in the books, waiting for him to be able to come in person. So we're really, really pleased. Professor Hamilakis repeated BA at the University of Crete and his PhD at the University of Sheffield in England, where he continued on to teach at the University of Wales Lampenter and the University of Southampton in the UK before becoming the Jokowski family, professor of archeology and professor of modern studies at Brown University in 2016. And those of you who know the history of archeology know about Lampenter and Sheffield and how kind of hotbed of theory they were back when he was there. So it's quite wonderful to have his history with us here today. Throughout his career, he's worked with many scholars in the field, laboratory and museums, including being the Weiner Lab Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, a fellow at Princeton University, the University of Cincinnati, the Huff & Ruffer Museum, the Bard Graduate Center, the Remark Institute and at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, most recently. Dr. Hamilakis thinks and writes broadly spanning topics such as sociopolitics of the past and the present, which we're gonna get a taste of today. Archeological ethnography linked to the archeology of contemporary undocumented migration, which is movement of people from global south to the global north, as he said in his own writing. He also works on the archeology of eating and drinking, again, his own words, linked to the archeology of the consuming body and of the bodily senses, as well as the archeology. In essence, the archeology of food, a topic of interest both he and I share. The ontology and materiality of photography, and I think we're gonna see some of that today, and the archeology and nationalism, which is part of his current recent, most recent book, which is wonderful. So I'm happy to share this with you later on. As well as critical pedagogy in archeology. And this is where he's been not only in his many writings, but also in his classes that he teaches. He has been recognized in our discipline in many ways with honor, visiting faculty fellowship, keynote lectures, and from his list of these events, I've just chosen keynote lectures and I found 19 on his list so far. And so this is your 20th. So his publications are many, as I said, across all those topics that I listed for you. And that's not just one paper or one book or one article, many, many topics. He has 18 books, some single authors, some edited, some special journal issues, and around 200 research articles. Again, not solely done as we do in archeology, but with many other scholars as well. So I cannot comment on all these publications, but I do wanna highlight several that I personally have found engaging and illustrative in our discipline, as well as suggesting and informing us on his active engagement with the public. And the first one that I remember very clearly was edited volume called Thinking through the Body, Archeology to Corporality, that he worked on and edited with Mark Fushiniak and Sarah Carlo. And some of us remember them being here on campus, Mark and Sarah some years ago. Another book he worked on, published actually by himself in 2007, The Nation and its Ruins, Archeology, Antiquity and National Imagination in Modern Greece, that won the Edmund Keely Book Prize in 2009. And in the same year, an edited volume with Phil Duke, they published a book titled Archeology and Capitalism from Ethics to Politics. So you can see how his themes occur again and again in different flavors. He's also published the provocative Archeologies in the Census, Human Experience, Memory and Affect and this most recent book, 2000, I'm not giving all the days, but 2022, again, titled Archeology, Nation and Race, Confronting the Past, Decolonizing the Future in Greece and Israel, so it was a combination of two scholars. He wrote that with Raphael Greenberg. So his geographical focus is the Neolithic and Bronze to Breeze in the Aegean, but he clearly is interested in archeology of the contemporary, which stands a broader area. Because of this, in his practice and writing, Dr. Hamilakis recognizes the historically contingent nature of archeology as a device of our modernity and its political nature that enables us to try and critique and be reflexive about the material world, not only in the past, but in today. He currently directs, I guess a long term, I'll say currently, but it's been some years now, at least 10, I think, a project at Cortolo Magola, I'm not saying that right, it's an archeology, it's an archeology and ethnography project in the Central Breeze that focuses on a Neolithic, a Middle Neolithic, a Mounded or Telethite, but he includes lots of other aspects to it, ethnography and also, which I hope he talked about, theater archeology. So maybe we'll find, we can ask him about it. So the point is, there's many, many themes that we talked about. I'm gonna conclude with three recent articles he's written just to get a flavor of his diversity. One, published this year, Food as Affirmative Bipolitics at the Border, Linnality, Eating, Practices and Migration in the Mediterranean, which of course, represents his current ethnographic, archeological ethnographic work. Second, also published this year, Border Assemblages Between Surveillance and Spectacle, What is Moria and What Comes After? Again, he's gonna tell us about Les Post and Moria. And third, this one, he's gotta tell us about a handbook for a haunted, new nomadic age, Potential Material History. So it's a very provocative title. And I'm assuming it must all feed into the title that was up there and is not, but we'll come back. And his title of his talk today is also provocative, New Histories of Humanity or Stories of Multi-Species Assemblages, Lessons from Neolithic Greece. So before I turn the stage over to Professor Yanis Hamilakis, I wanna invite you all to a reception afterwards after he's spoken to us and you asked your questions, we can all share some food with him both in the foyer and outside in front. So thank you very much for coming and please welcome Professor Hamilakis to art. Thank you. Until we get this done, I want to say a huge thank you for this production, very kind of production. I'm very, very glad to be here, to be here with you. Several years ago, Meg had invited me to give the spring lecture. Now I'm the to speak with you twice. And perhaps I came another time to talk in your class, Christine, about food. So all very, you know, fond and having memories from my time here and I thank you again for this kind of invitation. What I'm going to try and do today is to give you a flavor of some of my current kind of interpretations and thoughts. A lot of what I'm going to say is that I can mention the site of Kutuluma in Greece that as you will see, I did not want to do a kind of a conventional presentation of an archaeological site. I put long and hard on how do we actually talk about sites? And as you will see, I am talking about the kind of the default modes of presenting sites in very stereotyped and very often very objective this way. So that's one kind of concern, the site and how can we talk about the site? But another concern is the recent discussions that were prompt and inspired by a book that many of you may have read, the book by the two David, David Wengler and David Greber called The New History of Humanity, Don't Know Everything. So as you'll see, you have these two kinds of modalities used to devise it, a discussion on the book from a critical point of view and a discussion on a small scale site in the Salian plain. So how do we introduce an archaeological site? How do we communicate to colleagues but also to other interesting people our close encounters with specific materiality? Today I want to talk to you about the tell sites that have been excavating with many others. Of course, in 2009, in the Salian plain in Greece. The site is, okay, it's not moving. The site is called Kutrulu-Magula and Magula in Greece, in Greek, who notes a tail, a mount. Conventionally speaking, it's made face states to the end of their neolithic and the start of the middle neolithic, blasting for a couple of centuries in the transition from the 7th to the 6th millennium BC. It is a four-hectare site, roughly twice as large as most neolithic tail sites in Greece, rising about 6.6 meters above the plain. Now, the project is of course a collaboration project in many sense that one. There are many of us doing it and the credit goes to all our team. It's also a collaboration in the sense that I'm doing this with a psychological service. My co-director is Dr. Vina Kiparizia Posolita. And in addition to two of us, we're also collaborating with Dr. Vasili Stamis from UCL as a third collaborator. Dr. Kipariz is starting, in fact, digging the site in 2009 and she invited me to join her 2009 and since then, it is a share endeavor under the Kutiru Mabula Archaeology and Archaeological Ethnography project. So we're about to launch this new website where you will find a lot of information and also all the different publications. As Christine was saying, in addition to digging, in addition to ethnography, we also do a series of art projects, including, in fact, a theater project that aims to incorporate our archaeology and ethnography, a play being written specifically for that year and for the site, and it's been performed often with the collaboration of people from the local villages on site next to the trenches. Now, despite my extensive readings and writings on sensoriality and affectivity, when I often talk about this site, I find myself trapped in a discourse that replicates the disembodied objectivist mode being in the archaeology. Even the most sophisticated, less critical and interpretive attempts and accounts have not avoided that trap. We talk about theory more broadly and when we talk about specific sites to revert to that specific mode. I'm sure many of you know this feeling. So for today's talk, I have decided to do it differently, to reduce the site by citing passages from a book in progress or the philosophy of the game, inspired primarily by the site. Now, this may alarm some of you, but don't worry, there are going to be data. There are going to be scientific information alongside these kinds of reflections on the philosophy of encountering sites like this. A second device, as I said, to counter my habit there is a reflection of the new global history of humanity, the dawn of everything by the two David Grabber and David Wengro. The book that we'll be discussing for some time and for good reasons. So from a small deltide in the salient plane to the large scale global narrative and back. So the back and forth I think is quite key. So the vignettes or my own reflections on the philosophy of the game and some short interludes on the book. So you'll see the jump from one to the next in a minute. My first vignette then is called multi-species. So strange things happen every time we return to the site to start our season. In the first two or three days, we're constantly encountering and disturbing non-human beings who may decide their hope. We're approaching and clearing way many plants, but also we are meeting lizards, frogs, slugs, beetles, crickets, rats and snakes. They appear or jump out, suddenly and unexpectedly. And they run across the field the other direction as we walk from trench to trench and they climb on our trail. They must be quite annoyed, but they also must know that we have temporary guests and that the site will belong to them again in a month's time. We try to hunt them gently. We move some of them out of the trenches and into the safety of the adjacent fields. Knowing only to us that we are performing acts of displacement. But what about the animals that are not visible to us? The ones that they were hidden or had left the site before our arrival? The fields of which or to put differently the reshapings of the site are everywhere to be seen. What about the material traces or to put it more accurately the material works that these beings have created? What about the fragile, but ingenious architectonics of the spider's web? These silky and bowed entanglements that often make use of human architectures. And what about the holes? As in this case, often next to post holes or next to structures like a half right in this case. And finally, what about the domestic animals that occasionally find refuge at our site under our sheltered trenches fleeing aggressive conspecifics or human brutality? Archaeological fieldwork practices and discourses rarely turn their attention to these beings. They rarely, we rarely slow down to encounter them from up close. Archaeological tasks must proceed. Clearing and trench preparation will need to be carried out quickly and our digging, sampling and recording routines must progress steadily. Except when we are to attribute blame. The talk of the rat, the foxes, the budgers, the bees as destroyers, as criminals who've committed the cardinal thing of bioturbation. Paradoxically, we are paying specific attention to the animals of the past, the material traces, the bones, the human structures associated with them, given their manure, as we'll hear in a minute, about the site. But not to the animals that have been happy and engage with our site today. We rarely stop to ask, along with Anna-Chen, the question I call, what manages to live in the ruins we have made? And furthermore, what are these enduring lives that are telling us about the world should we care to listen? We've been digging this site since 2009 and our colleagues, as they said, 2001, our colleagues in the Geocatological Service. And yet, in the last couple of years, it became clear to us that we live and work in a different moment. Things have changed. Our weather expectations do not hold anymore. Summer digging in the Mediterranean is no longer the same. Intense, like it, could give way to lasting torrential rain from one day to the next, and to humid almost tropical conditions. Winters, at least in this part of the world, are also getting more severe. So while some of the species we encounter when we go there every year are the years of fauna of the area, some others, including foxes and badgers, were not meant to be in that specific agricultural or chemical archaeological scale. But they are here for a reason, the disturbance of their own habitat due to the intense altering, exploitation, and commodification of the land. Our ruins are freshly dug deposits and profiles offered in our shelter trenches, allow them to live and to thrive of sorts, and they provide new spaces for an uneasy coexistence. In 2018, we published a scientific article as a team and titled The Neolithic Tale as the Multistatious Monuments. In there, we showed that domestic animals, sheep, goats, and cattle, were living on site, and they were even sharing elaborate buildings with humans. Even our largest building on site on the top of the hill, which is about eight square meters in area, and with walls that actually survive up to a meter and a half in height. So you can see this is the earlier phase, this one here, under the latest phase of the building, this is another kind of, this is the largest building I'm talking about, and maybe another slide to see the height of the wall that I'm talking about. So even this building housed a place for some time of history, domestic animals inside it. So our working assumption is that this building is more likely community or assembly of sorts at the top of the hill. If that is the case, and it is, it was a communal assembly hall, then that community that shared a building included both humans and non-human beings. Animals were fed on site and with the by-product of crop processing, but they're also grazing in the fields nearby. To quote from that article, I quote, humans and animals live in the enclosed proximity, shared common spaces, and participated in the routine, reciprocal relations and interactions. Such close habitation and coexistence entails a distinctive sense of sensoriality, one based on the tactile, oral and or factory proximity to animals and other bodily functions and their bodily functions, to animals and their bodily functions and to quotations. We then highlight in that article the sense of mutual care, between domestic animals and humans and things of, you know, foldering strategies on site. And we concluded that, I quote, whatever the initial model of animal domestication, it seems that thousands of years after this process was completed, a pattern of cohabitation, commensality, and perhaps natural, mutual and transporal care involving humans and animals who are still the norm in theolithic communities. But we encounter non-human animals or human animals find us in other ways too. At least the idea of animality is actually to be found in other forms and in other kinds of media. Take the case of clay figurines, for example, of which we have a very large number, more than 500 today. We archaeologists often divide them into anthropomorphic and zomophic, and more recently talk also about hybrids between the two. It is clear, however, that it is our anthropocentricity that drives that specific distinction, the definition, the anthropomorphic and the zomorphic one. The first figure into encounter when we went there, the new project in 2009, was this one we found over there on site and you can see the photo here. And as you can see, it's a depiction not of the non-human and not of a human in the traditional sense. It doesn't depict a human body nor an animal body. Over the years, we realized that while there are some clearly anthropomorphic figurines, some of them clearly indicate the physical size of the human body, many, if not most of our figurines were depictions of beings that were beyond the category of the animal and beyond the category of the human body. And I want to show you some examples of what these are, some of the ones that are actually very, very close to the human form. That's the head here. And here is another head with some sort of mask, the type of archaeologists who started didn't talk about perhaps a depiction of masks on the face. And of course, this one, it is from this year, a well-known type of a sitting female figurine. These are the ones that can be clearly described as anthropomorphic. But if you actually move on and examine several others like this one on which, by way, we sported finger prints, if you're now analyzing in detail using various imaging techniques to actually understand the activity process and the making process, but also perhaps start thinking about distinguishing age and gender on the basis of the fingerprints. Or this one, or this one, sorry, I have to run them, but you can always find one that, and I have another slide of this, that you can take a look and you can tell me what you see here being depicted. So many, I think, it's not most of our collection figurines depict completely fantastic beings, straight out of the book of Louis Borghese's Book of Imaginary Beings. This large collection, then, invites us to rethink our categories of the human and of the animal in the analysis of clay figurines. But to return to more conventionally understood animals, we now realize that this site is a multi-species monument, hence the title in our article, in more sense than we had originally thought. Their work on site, the animal work on site, their life with humans, their bodily presence, and their bodily external in the form of manure contributes to the gradual accumulation of the deposit which became the tale. These things are providing us with several philosophical, ethical, and political lessons. The multi-species nature of past communities and of materiality past and present, the living properties of our field component assemblages, constantly flux perpetually being transformed as a cross-species entanglement, alliances, and affective forms which will have to foster and cultivate, especially in the era of anthropogenic environmental disaster. And now to shift registers. And my first interlude on the Dawn of Everything, which as you'll see it's in a dialogue with what that said. So, I don't know how many of you have read it, but the Dawn of Everything is the fruit of a long-term dialogue between the anthropologist David Greber, the late David Greber, and the archeologist David Wengro, which is the book is barely one year after its launch and it's already, as you know, the fall of the press, a publishing phenomenon beside its commercial success and not only in the English-speaking world. I cannot recall another occasion in the recent acceleration past where we both written mostly for the general public and generated so much debate within the field, within the scholarly community. If this book is one thing about everything else, then it's a systematic world research and lenders attack on teleological conceptions of history and on sociocultural evolution. Now, granted, we've been in our community about our anthropologists. These ideas have been heavily critized. For many, many years now, but what these two scholars have done is to provide the accumulation of all these evidence and do so in a manner that is extremely readable for the general public beyond the specialists. And let's remember that despite our own critique, despite the kind of the epistemic critique of evolutionism, the terms such as bonds, chief terms and states are still with us. There are residual cases of flat mentality even in our courses very often, often of course, accompanied with the qualification that we do so for convenience purposes, for convention as opposed to kind of belief in the validity. So instead of linearity in this book and determinism and hierarchy, we get playfulness, experimentation and seasonal diversity, but also heterographical social bonds often defined by care, whether talking about the Neolithic revolutions that never happened or the emergence of the first cities. Now, to show that things have been otherwise or could have been otherwise, that things could have been otherwise is what I consider one of the most fundamental roles of archeology and anthropology in the present. And this book performs a role which shows that things could have been otherwise admirably. Now, that things could have been otherwise also implies that things can still be otherwise. And here lies the cycle with the more important conjugation of the book. At the moment of multiple crises from climate to climate emergency to the virus of white supremacy and the various new fascism, fascism's this book gives us not only scholars but also the wider community license to imagine. Imagine different worlds, different configurations, different possibilities in the ongoing struggle for freedom. Indeed, why the obsession with origins in general and the origins of inequality in particular characterizes most if not all popular accounts about global histories think of the various books in circulation. It is clear that the key concern this book is not with inequality, but with freedom. They are not searching for past utopias to offer them to us as models for the present and future nor are they looking at the authors for anthropological and intellectual justification of their own political stances and convictions. They are the side to convince humans everywhere for always social and political agents, debaters and philosophers constantly imagining and experimenting with a wide variety of modes of being and being communally despite what the environmental feminism, ideology and the neoliberal tinnadogma, there is no alternative, could have us believe. As someone who has been working in the past few years with the people of the moon on the border and with contemporary migration, I was glad to see that the freedom of movement has been championed as one of the three main freedoms that the authors consider important in the past and the present. The other being the freedom to disobey and the freedom to imagine and construct different forms of social organization. For all that and for more, I think we should be grateful to the authors for such a gift. And yet in the spirit of disobedience that the authors have actually championed, it is important to keep reflecting on the anthropemes, the potential, the shape and the blind spot of this endeavor, of this external endeavor. Global narratives of humanity is the germ that these authors want to respond to and you are, in fact, chosen to use themselves in this book. Although they are tend to do the shape of the germ to actually do it in a very different way. But what kind of tacit statement do the authors make? Were they all such a former for the global narrative or the global history of humanity? What kind of authority are they involved in? And what are the implications for the politics of knowledge? This is the book of programs, local diversity and champions important to the impact of indigenous thinking. But it is written and published within the global north. And the voices of the global south are mediated by the authors while contemporary indigenous thinkers are rarely discussed. As in any other attempts such as this one, the difficult question is who has the rights to invoke such a global panoramic vision? Who is entitled to tell the story of the whole world? And my question to the author, to the survivor, to David Wendell, who in the chance to actually debate this book a few weeks ago at Brown as part of the conference. How can the next iteration of this project incorporate the diverse, immediate voices from elsewhere? From the contemporary indigenous communities which still produce orators and intellectuals? If this is a 700 year program and do a larger project, which one hopes would be, how can that larger project become a collective and communal endeavor within the active involvement and participation of community from the global south? Furthermore, and here I come to my first lineage and the link to what I'm going to say, is it the first of humanity we need today or histories of multi-spacious assemblages? In the times of climate emergency and of the moment when white supremacy is the weather as the African-American scholar Christina Sharp has noted, but also several decades after the dissentering of the abstract figure of the human in social and cultural thought, should we not go beyond anthropocentric narratives with their grounding in whiteness? The anthropos of the West modernity was the white human and most commonly the white male. How can we, which is often involved in the don of everything, we often say we are stuck, we are this, we are the other? How can this we? Be expanded to include non-human beings? The world as we inhabit it has been covered by multiple sentient and non-sentient beings. That is the simple story that we need to start telling more forcefully and systematically and in more time-ordered ways, beyond academic texts through images and multi-sensorial performances. So to my second vignette again on the side and that vignette has the title of polychrony, anachrony and with the temporality. And by the way, this photo and many other so called artistic photos for this talk are by my collaborator and photographer and archeologist, Fotisipandidis. It is part of an artistic project that stands alongside the excavation, ethnography, theater and other things. So here is there with that recording photographically facets that are not recorded by the standard device of photography as a recording device in archeology. They do not record, they evoke our presence there and our kind of encounter with materiality. So if human beings, sorry, if non-human beings can be our philosophy teachers, can clay and stone and soil to the same for us, can they also be philosophy teachers for us? It was the first day of our project in 2009 and in our pledge, which we call theta-3, we cleared the ground for digging. We came to this site to continue excavating what we were told is an eolithic site, a six millennium BC Neolithic tale. And yet in the first 10 centimeters as we were digging and well before we encountered the war we were expecting to find, we found, we encountered a port, a vessel that comes, that is dated conventionally 5,000 years later that is a late Bronze Age, a second millennium BC thinking the chaelics photos of you who know the Bronze Age archeology of the Aegean. It was really recorded and bugged and was forgotten. And we returned to our trench and soon enough we found the Neolithic wall we were expecting to find. And yet that moment, the moment of fighting the chaelics came back to Honda several years later. In 2011 and 12, we in fact encountered and excavated the whole complete late Bronze Age, Palestine, next to the Neolithic building. So here is again, a Palestine that you can see it's on the same level as the so-called Neolithic houses we actually excavated. In 2011, we also encountered a burial here which was a burial, a burial of a human which was dated to the 11th century CE of the common era, right? So yes, it's several thousand years later. So you could say, so watch, this is a multi-period site. This is, you know, there are so many of them, a multi-period site and nothing else. Only that that label a multi-period site is inscribed within our modernist understanding of time as linearity, as succession. It results from a synoptic view of material history, seeing everything together, the synoptic view and it adds a teleological understanding of the morality. While these stones and other materials appear to us today as belonging to different moments in time, they can in fact be treated as materializations of duration. As with all material entities, duration would have been the primary and fundamental property to recall the philosopher Berkson here. As such, they would have enacted time as multi-temporality, not as succession. The stones from the Neolithic buildings would have continued to lead an act upon the world in the second millennium BC and in the 12th century ADC. In fact, it could be argued that it was the living agency that continued presence that attracted the people in the periods of the site. While the mnemonic power of the site is often involved when such later finds are encountered, it is clear that something more is happening here. Returning the dead to a place, remember these are very old, both the Bronze Age and the medieval era. Returning the dead to a place of mnemonic value seems appropriate, of course. But while digging for those very old, people would have encountered the material presences which would now classify as Neolithic. Think of the Bronze Age person digging to build this whole stone in a Neolithic context, Neolithic site. They would have, in other words, entered into a dialogue with such material presences. They would have perhaps the purpose and reuse some of them, some of the Neolithic stones or other material presences, giving them new lives and adding to their multi-temporal histories. Even the soil, the stone and the clay features which will now date slickly as Neolithic, such as these walls here from these buildings, teach us that our chronometric thinking is out of sync with the material reality on the ground. Digging, for example, digging pits disturbs the layers, as we know, bringing forth constant matter while entering, while inserting into its earliest data and new material. You dig to encounter earlier things, but you also insert into the pit things that come from another moment. Earlier worlds, as we know, are often robbed for stone material which is incorporated into subsequent building basics. And the red clay from burnt strata in the Neolithic settlement is dug up and used as bonding material in subsequent walls made of white limestone. So look at the bonding material here on this wall, the very, very bright red, which comes from the burnt structures, the earliest structure of people disturbed in the building space. And think of the contrast between the white soft limestone and the very bright burnt clay as the bonding material here, especially if you assume that these walls were left with no other kind of cover outside. So these are things that to us speak not just of functional processes of reuse, but also kind of a multi-temporal dialogue with different materials. You can think of different poetic and other expressions that actually talk about this phenomenon. Think of six experience, time is out of join. Or think of Portners' phrase, the past is in bed, it is not even past. These materials resist our attempts to necrological categorization and placed into doubt our modernist certainties on the linearity of time. You could think philosophically, as I mentioned already, Bexon, but also delays on duration or even Nietzsche and his notion of the untimely, the untimely that acts counter to our present moment, counter to our time. But perhaps you can also think again, philosophically to stay with the words and tradition, very dark and his notion of ontology, ontology, both haunting and ontology, the ghostly presence of life past but which are still not completely past yet and will forever haunt us. A disturbing ontology of time that we must be taking seriously. And of course, before, very often before these Western philosophers, indigenous thinkers in this land and many other lands have spoken about the past as a life, about how this matter, about the land as living history. There's so many references we can think of here. So allowing stones and clay and pits to become our philosophy teachers because appending to their own sensorial contemporary demands a process of attunement, attunement we reside in the stones and the clay. And this is a part of the embodied immersion and acclimatization to the material sensorial realm of the sun. A sensorial education that we all have to go through every time we return to the side. You may have not, obviously, you're starting your own side. It takes a few days and weeks to become a cue to the materiality of the place. And it's education we need to go through again and again every time we return to the thing or to the side. So my second interlude returning to the dawn of everything briefly. What is the conception of temporality we actually use the two degrees in this book? Well, as I said, this is an anti-progressive list, almost Benjaminian manifesto, but one that goes along the archival grain in the sense that it followed the temporal regime of modernity and the theological chronometry of the modern era, the arms domain. But what if this book was instead to abandon the distinction between past, present, and future as stable grounds and speak of the fragility and indeterminacy? What if the authors were to accept that several archaeologists, anthropologists and now some historians are suggesting that, and I quote a historical reference here, I'll say the name of what it was from, that what we usually call the present is merely effragile consensus. That phrase started with me, effragile consensus, a silent clash received by a book by Edith Stein, Whitney, and Geruelanos called Power and Time, published two years ago. An explicit discussion of temporality as the experience and perception of time and of historicity, not as facticity as they discuss in the book, but as different conceptions of history would have enraged the arguments of the book. It was perhaps exposed not only the nexus of time and power, but also the simultaneous coexistence of different and often flashing temporal regimes in each context. Indeed, from the dawn's least of the source of social power and domination, which are sovereignty and the use of violence one, charisma, the second, and the control of knowledge, the third, what is missing is chronopolitics, time as memory and thus historicity, which can become a political resource, can become a resource of social power in its context. This is not listed in their own source of social power, although occasionally they do talk about the use of the past and the present. Return to the science for our next vignettes and our next vignettes devoted to water, water. So we've been reading the science for some time now. The neolithic inhabitants of this place had a special relationship with water. At the beginning, it was the residues that were finding on bones and on shares, the sandy residues, the gaining substances that resisted our attempts to remove it, despite the hard work, despite our strong brushes, our rigors back and forth. Then there were the archaeobotanical and zoological, especially the micro-formal reports, talking of the hydrophilic plant and animals of breeds and also river class of amphibians and water snakes. For example, these shell species called crassus crassus, which lived in riverbeds and was dug by people from the riverbed and was taken back to the site. And finally, there were the construction works, the water-scattered stones, some of them which saw earlier, the soft limestone that clearly had kind of signs of kind of water action around them, but more so the extensive perimeter ditches that we saw first in the geophysical work had been the micrometer survey here. You can see the wide concentric surrounding linear features that we interpreted as ditches and here's the interpretation of the geophysics. You can see them going all over the hill, several layers, several kinds of circles around the hill itself, and which we finally, a couple of years ago, located and ground to archaeologically throughout the ditch when we found one of those ditches here. And you can see a few more slides of it. This is a photogrammetry, kind of rendering, and here you can see also the bottom but also not the steps entrances into the ditch. This stage, by the way, was about four and a half meters wide and about a meter and a half deep from the assumed surface of the Neolithic level. And clearly people wanted to have access to the bottom time and again, it wasn't that go answered and abandoned. So that is quite interesting. Here's another focus, this kind of artistic photo of excavating that specific ditches. Alyosha, by the way, was one of the excavators in the team a few years ago on that ditch. Yeah, especially the digital one. So these perhaps were attempts to contain water, but also to avoid flooding and perhaps also to preserve the story and kind of step access to the ditch to actually retrieve water back and dig for clay, I'm sure, for other kinds of material. And what about our more recent find, a rare pottery workshop, six million of these say pottery workshop and you can see, I'll run a couple of things and I'll talk about it here, is kind of this is the clay wall of the workshop and these are the best of their pottery kilns of the seven here is a closed apple back specific kiln. You can see it's wall, this is the end of the floor of the kiln, a pottery kiln. We found lots of misshade pots nearby as well. Forming was happening there as well as kind of firing of those pots. And this specific workshop was found here at the territory of the very close to the ditch, very close to the sources where water could be preserved and stored and perhaps retrieved for some of the pottery making processes. And of course, 8,000 years later here, while we are again on the same site and water is for every year, a major feature in our lives in many ways. On the first day of the dig and after a year's absent, we arrived to find some of our trenches, of course, flooding, the soil over and soft, moist and damp and muddy. Our lowest trench, the trench of the ditch was completely covered with water and bailing our water was one of our tasks for days before we were able to dig. So in the following days, we would enter into a dialogue with this specific substance, with this greenish and brownish marquiseps substance, you know, the stagnant water, we could bail it out every morning, only to realize, especially in the ditch, that it will come back again to the night and the water from the water table will actually enter the ditch again. But even on the slope of the trench, not just on the ditch, the green uneven patches on our vertical profiles, our stratigraphic protoflora, spanning hundreds of years in stratigraphy offer another testimony to the presence of water. The British poet Alice Oswald says that she likes water because of its falling qualities and its ability to rise again. She likes it also because it does not like it so orderly because it can pass like an apparition, without the trace, she said, without trace. Well, without the trace, as archaeologists, we know that that's not the case. Water has left leaves plenty of traces here on this site and on many other sites. It transformed our site, made it a fluid terrain, a course of reshifting materiality. Water transformed our digging too. Water slowed us down. Water made us straddle with mud as we attempted to sieve the soil, as we spent endless hours taking hundreds of soil in our hands, squeezing it with hidden artifacts, kneading like a dough, as if we were preparing clay to no pause. But Oswald is right about another thing, about order and disordering. Water mocks our attempt at ordering the materiality of the site. Belies our effort to impose a certain, even tellable, stability. We are forced to go with its flow, its temporal logic, its liquid thinking. We are forced to listen as in many other, as in many raining digging days, as we gather under the pulgated iron off the shelter and waiting for the rain to pass and we would listen to that characteristic rain falling or metal who are forced to smell it as it dampens the wheat and the cotton fields around them. We're forced to respond to it as we're constantly cleaning our muddy box. It rearranged our sensorial field. It assembled multiple co-presences. It looks as face-to-face with creatures, beings, things that we never encounter, we never have encountered otherwise. Water teaches us humility. So this is a very short and a little turning to the dawn of everything. Time as embodied material memory is experienced and activated through the sensorial attention to matter. Through the sensorial and affective affordances of elements, things, places and environments. Despite the plethora of archeological examples, I wish the dawn of everything was more archeological in the sense of a detailed appreciation and analysis of the physicality of matter and its insolent properties, perhaps co-presumed fewer examples, as opposed to the many hundreds of examples that they are involved. Such an appreciation and thus multi-temporal experiments of matter, time as a sense of matter as engendered sensoriality, duration would ever reach the book. Now references are made of course sensoriality in the book but as practices of communal facing. But as we know, the category of facing has been framed in many different ways in archeology and very often it is used within the teleological thinking that the office won't counter and overcome. So what is missing is not genetic discussions about facing, but specific discussions of eating, drinking, other sort of practices and the sculpting sensoriality of matter. The possibilities that are engendered and the anarchic character of sensoriality. And I want to approach the course of my talk by returning to the side and most specifically the community that we work with, the human community we work with on site. My next net is called Aftek and the more personal one. It was again 2009, the first season of our field project and the first night in the village in the middle of this facility of playing in grills. We are sitting on a long table in Taverna, all the students and staff together and all we get to start our project. The first night in the village full of anticipation but also can consider how the community are going to receive us. An elderly man on the next table was drinking beer pencil but clearly attentive to our presence. We exchanged a few words, he asked a few questions but then he suddenly disappears. A few moments later he returns, comes back holding a violin. He started playing for us and the music lasted for the rest of the evening, transforming our first action night into a memorable occasion. I learned later that this old gentleman was a micro-fumbugaria part of the Greek speaking migration of people from Bulgaria to the Greeks in the 1910s and 20s. He was well known in the area and beyond he had traveled widely, had performed his violin in many different places in the country and beyond this. It was a few years later in one of our subsequent seasons when Stamatis, the name of the violin player, had passed away that I met Calliope. Calliope, his partner in life and music, his music scenes, the scene during the duet and the diva and the diva on her own. She loved me and I loved her. We went to see her tonight. I'm liking it at the moment. That youthful, this youthful 80-year-old had already narrated her longing of her life in our previous years. It's a long story. Child of communist partisans, she was left behind when the parents crossed the border to the Socialist Republic, the Socialist Republics at the end of the civil war, that tragic moment in the history. She survived. She cried. She loved Stamatis and she loved music. I sing on my own. I sing all the time. Even in my sleep, she told me tonight. One time, a couple of years ago, she brought out, she brought out out of her bedroom, the traditional costume of Stamatis, the one that was brought from Bulgaria. She wanted me to work. She wanted me. She wanted to see me in Stamatis clothes. She wanted to see that costume, worn in feasts and celebrations by her beloved husband. Come alive again. She sang for me that night. I told her about Stamatis in the first encounter, the first night in the village. As a migrant, she understood strangers. She told me. We drank together. We laughed and cried. And then I left. And I was leaving. I remember that this woman had the name of my mother. And if she was alive, she would have been of a similar age. Kayop invited me to her sonorous memory scale. She is one of my philosophy teachers. Every time we meet, she teaches me the effective archaeology of being in the world. She explains to me the sensorial constitution of life of memory. She is teaching me the art of what our colleague at the Institute calls the ordinary affects, ordinary affects. Things happen in that in between space, neither mine, nor hers, a space structured by our embodied lives, the simpler that we are actually drinking, the small courtyard with the flower pots and the space structured by the singing, by her tales, by her memories, our shared philosophical destiny is grounded on sonority, on the history of popular singing music that connects her with tomatoes many, many years after he's there. Her philosophical lesson is one of what Stephen Felt has called acoustymology, not epistemology, but acoustymology. I sing even in my dreams, she said, So our lives intersected because of the dig. The site of Kutuluma brought us together. Calliope is a king participant in the theatrical performances we stage every year next to the open trenches. She has never read spinosa, but she has recognized our desire to enact an effective archaeology, which is still, which includes her too. And she's determined not only to fully participate in that affected space we are creating, but also to teach us how a philosophical poetics of art that should look like. And I want to finish now with two sentences. I've spoken long enough and with no food, no drink and no singing. So I have learned, what I've learned from the dawn of everything and from the plants, the animals, the clay, the stone, and the water on our side, and from my friend, dear friend Calliope, is first that global histories cannot be placed small scale, detailed and finally textured, affected and sensorial accounts matter, time and activity. That an attack on teleology, developmentalism and progressivism can be much more effective and effective, of course, if it unsettles the whole terrain of modernist temporality, the notion of archaeology, I think of what I'm saying, the fragile consensus we call the present. And finally, that rather than harking back to notions of humanity, we should conceive of locally grounded but globally impactful communities, communities of care and acting, communities that include multiple species of sentient beings, not sentient individuals. The assemblies that we were talking, we were taking place in the assembled houses on a hypothetical example, so I showed you, seem to have been made not just of humans, but of other beings too, including domestic animals. These are the communities that I encountered the multi-temporal knowledge, and these are the lessons that taught me and I try to convey to you today. Thank you very much. And apologies for the long talk. That was wonderful. Thank you very much. So if you're willing to have some questions about this, would you please repeat them back so that they get recorded? Yeah, sure. So when they get recorded. Of course. I know it was long, so I apologize and I'm sure you need a couple of minutes still. Thank you. Thank you so much. And as usual, you cover so much ground, and then you focus a little bit, and then you move on. So we're going to see hope here and there. Yeah. This is great, because we all need that. And of course, thinking about your starting, how do we represent ourselves and how do we represent the sites that we work at? This is, of course, a very starting question of that we're struggling with these days because the old ways that we used to do in the past are big and problematic in the same way. So the question is, and I know you published one article, but how do you incorporate this into a way of presenting it to a wider audience than through here or a journal article here or there? How do you take this in-body, emotional? Deeply connected to the site, to the experiences that you and others have had there? And how does that communicate? How do we make our technology more, from the heart than from the objective past that we're demanding to produce? Okay, for the benefit of those who are on Zoom, my good friend and colleague Mekongi asked me, how do we communicate this vision of archeology to people beyond academia, I guess, and beyond our circle of colleagues in archeology? How do we convey that archeology of the heart? Because, well, that's that the struggle you're facing. And rather than kind of agonizing on the hand about this, I'm thinking of the different scales we all work. So for me, the communication to the immediate audience to the people who are living around the site, next to us is our first goal. So that's, you know, hence of those projects I mentioned briefly here, but had no time to elaborate on. So for Saint Christian earlier that, we of course do the conventional cycles every year and they do the open days and they do all that, but that's clearly not enough. You know, we shouldn't assume that if we take people on site and say, for these things that would immediately, and hence the projects, hence the attempt to theater to perform the site, to perform the archeology of heart, or the archeology of heart, to another medium that is not conventionally used by archeologists. It's a lot of effort and work on all our part. Our colleagues, our colleagues in charge of the archeology project is a professional actor, who also has a degree in archeology. And he comes and sometimes he's other collaborators. So they come and dig with us. And they then write the play as they dig and as they communicate with the community. So they do some ethnography in the evening. So they dig in the morning and they write a play that would connect with some of the realities in the villages as well as some of the realities we are actually uncovering on site and make that dramatic short but I think very effective and effective performance. And then ask some of the people from the village to also be the actors that will co-produce the performance next to the projects. So that's I think a specific way we are actually using in that level, scale of the community around the site. But the plays, some of the plays have then moved elsewhere. So the first stage performance had a different feeling. It was so successful on site as there were invitations by colleagues in other places to actually stage it in more conventional spaces, not just in exchange, but also in restaurants, in art museums, not performance. So that transported some of the materiality of the site in another locality, another occasion, another audience. As for how we do it in kind of the broader community, well, these are still things that we are thinking and experimenting at the moment. We are thinking that artistic photography is another thing that's why I keep collaborating with photos of different buildings. And we are hoping to produce more works that rely on this photography, some of which we saw here. And the website is going to be another, but this is a kind of a confession that I have to make. Perhaps you can help me. I'm still struggling. I know that there has been a lot of work on how actually to do that in terms of final publications, what to do when you want to put the site together as a final excavation report. And I don't want to do the conversion alone, but I'm thinking, trying to think of alternative ways and I've learned from some of your experiments. This is still an ongoing discussion I have with my team. So I would say the short answer is multi-modal performances on site and elsewhere, beyond the text. So I always recommend not to put it so slightly forward that some of you are here and so close to Tokyo. Yeah. So we should really, you know, talk about how it works. Something I need to go back to, yeah, yeah. And then the other thing that, you know, sort of hangs over us, is the academic reward system. That's right. And you know, how you don't follow the job and engage in some kind of way. But that's why we keep publishing our conventional academic scientific articles. These need to be out and these need to be out, as you say, primarily for the benefit of our general colleagues who have published in those forums. But then alongside those, I think we should continue doing all the other stuff. It's doubled, it's more time consuming and the final publication takes much longer. Yes, right. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's going to be like my own thing of the knowledge of the machine in the knowledge making machine which is like a kind of, you know, of how you can get it. Taking over our field in the last decade or two, be it the history of the materials, and the end of, and the main end of states, and I think you actually need to realize it very much in your own work about this type of knowledge. My suggestion from another senior position and also a member of the human life is perhaps not to try to tell you one story, but it's always on comparing and contrasting different elements of the style. We can have the volume that helps the style for many people. Yeah. Yeah. Under the understanding that no one will be concrete. Of course. So no one will be fundamental for the certain people. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. Of course. I mean, the question is, our suggestion is, in order to achieve that kind of scope of integrating these different angles is to produce different narratives not to our interpretation, but different. Some of the proficient scientists of every place in which our approach of the last decade or three decades or more allows them to make use of the choice which we didn't tell before and are published in nature or any other science genre. Yeah. Some of the people discovered in Jeroz and become Valinda in all these kinds of wine jugs. Nobody thought that this sort of that's a part of what I read. And they thought it was in a different way. So, yeah. Sorry. I wish all the people were interested. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So what are your suggestions? I think it's happening already. And we have very, very good science journalists who do that. But I am saying that we need to try harder to go beyond the sense of history being just human stories or stories spoken and written exclusively from the point of view of the human. I was critiquing the anthropocentrism of much of archeology, but also of other disciplines. And I was saying, what do we mean to write the multi-species history of night? What do we need to write the multi-species history of site like this? Yeah. Beyond talking about animal bones within a discourse of subsistence exploitation or other kind of motive we often animal husbandry we often use in archeological knowledge. How can we say, okay, these were co-producers of the site. These animals, these things we share to the shared site. So it's not a site of human, the site of many different things. Let's write that story as a story of multi-species. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I can't imagine how you would do it in a way which is not the sort of federal academic publication, print publication. Is there something, is there something in 19, something I mean, you'll, you'll love me there's a book or book you are Yeah. talking about Yeah. Say, yeah. Imagine a different life. Yeah. Well, can you imagine a different way? Yeah. So. The question for the Jim audience by the thing and another great friend of mine colleague is how, how do we do this practically beyond the conventional archeological text. So in the book that I have something new from that book is not going to be a professional archeological text, but I hope because this style of writing is not a conventional archeological type of writing. It's not a report on the site. It's not even a popular account of the site is a you could call it creative nonfiction if you want. It is a kind of reflection that is deliberately written in a different, hopefully more engaging style. It will include also little passages will include other forms and hopefully will have also visual component to your company that can be different style of writing. But you have experimented with many different forms. Yeah, I don't know myself. Yeah, it's a constant cycle, but I think we I mean, as we know, anthropology is going through it's more time more now. Yeah. Yeah. Bring in the the animal or whatever they're doing and we finally measure absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, the way publication something you've heard in relation to Neolithic site and other things. So the online publications offers more possibilities in terms of more time modality. So this is something that we want to experience but I still believe that the text itself can be done differently. So we have on our minds the right text on conventional products and it's something that evokes affectivity evokes notates and sorority recombination of image and text in a different manner can be extremely powerful too. So I hope let's see the same. So I wanted to add in because you were alternating Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then yeah. What has had a new way of looking at the larger picture? Yeah. How has that engaging so much intensively with that book and the author of that book been able to move you towards these other ways of engaging with and presenting yourself. I mean you gave us been yet but I've never I mean you haven't really wanted to share it really with us. Yeah. There's something about you wouldn't be Well I mean I read the book couple of times in the last year so we had that conference I'm still digest so for the the audiences the question is how do how does the book the everything I discussed here has reshaped the way I deal with the site the site our own site how that was shaped kind of reshaped our interpretation and I'm saying that I'm still digesting that book and I'm still kind of reflecting through the kind of ideas and modes but what one way that I try to communicate perhaps not so successfully is to try and merge the micro scale of the side with the group of the bigger scale of the global scale that I'm actually saying trying to think is there still scope to of how can we do that for example they said one of the criticisms I have of the book is that partly because of its global coverage the many archaeological examples that they use are not really sensorial enough or not archaeological enough are not finely textured to involve that power of materiality that I hope I would have probably and that's something that I think can be done once you focus on the side and that's one way a second way is to think more kind of the sense of the so-called assembly powers or community housing a key device in the book is let's say the Ukrainian megasites the presence of assembly buildings many other sites you know buildings that are central to the community they are not meant to be habitation buildings but these are gatherings or taking place as I said we have a building such as the assembly house but I wanted to rethink of that idea by bringing in the multi-species angle I'm trying to actually say because what I'm seeing is that buildings that they will not a convention of gathering place for humans and a lot if you have your sheep and the goat and the cattle and the humans in the same space and you all assemble in the same very elaborate building with stone walls one meter and a half or two meters high it means something else it means that for them community does not mean that human community for their community means also the animals together so that's another way that actually that book helped me to do the shape so it was both a deep appreciation of the mission of the book and at the same time some concerns that I think need to be voiced as a kind of attempts to take it with us and go beyond it and actually do the next the next thing I don't know if you have any plans in some of it but you're right I mean another talk would be kind of okay now let me tell you the story of the site based on my completely thinking that would wait for a few years I know it's fit and we're all filled like that thing but it I think attempts to really bring in a different perspective on human existence from an indigenous absolutely non-European non-Western non-Western point of view if you're working at a site that's in the European tradition so it's sort of allowed to use the European for different but should you try and feel that back and have a different intellectual or ontological world my good friend is my indigenous person my indigenous interlocutor she lives in the land and she has the philosophy about life and about beings and about past history and customs that I have so much to learn from that's why I made a central figure in my talk today or continue but for many years so yes there's not conventional sense of indigenous groups in the sense of we know from this country or other parts but there are people who have lived in those sites for many generations and they have their own sense of temporality materiality that are considered