University Of Birmingham

Graduate Student, Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity

College of Arts and Law

Thesis Title: THE NEOLITHIC OF THE PEAK DISTRICT: A LEFEBVRIAN SOCIAL GEOGRAPHY APPROACH TO SPATIAL ANALYSIS

About

I am a doctoral researcher, principally interested in the architecture, material culture and social spaces of Neolithic cultures of the British Isles and Northern-Europe (c. 4000 BC – c. 2000 BC), the politics of the past and the philosophies of Marxism and phenomenology.

I would be interested to hear from anyone with similar theoretical interests and/or archaeologists working in my main research areas of the UK: the Derbyshire Peak District, the Trent Valley and the East and West Midlands regions more generally.

THESIS
My thesis focuses on the concept of space in the work of the French Marxist philosopher and social theorist Henri Lefebvre (1901-91) and the relevance of Lefebvre’s Spatial Dialectics to archaeologists using spatial analysis to understand prehistoric society. I take as my cue his comment that:

  'Once deciphered, a landscape or a monument refers  us back to a creative capacity and to a signifying process' ("The Production of Space" [1974] 1991: 115).

I am intrigued by Lefebvre’s approach to space and architecture as both a sensuous and contemplative phenomenon: space as simultaneously a context of meaning/state of affairs (physical, conceptual, social) from which we are ‘referred back’ to the historical conditions/processes (perceptual, symbolic and 'lived') under which that space became possible. Space therefore has both synchronic and dynamic aspects. This much should be obvious, but there is a persistent gap or dichotomy between our everyday and analytical selves. Lefebvre makes this real/conceptual split the focus of his work and creates a methodology ('spatial dialectics')with which to understand 'the real'. Ultimately, Lefebvre's is an Hegelian Marxist philosophy of history in which material conditions, cultural meanings and social being intersect at 'social space'. 

In my thesis I explore Lefebvre's approach to social space by developing and applying a 'Lefebvrian' methodology to a prehistoric case study (the Neolithic Peak District. This project has involved confrontation with and critique of the dominant phenomenology-, structural-symbolic- and social archaeology-led approaches to social space, which I suggest suffer from various levels of methodological idealism.

EDITORIAL ROLES
I am a founding committee member (2006-2010), former general editor (2007-08) and book reviews editor (2006-07 & 2009-10) of the Postgraduate internet published journal 'Rosetta: Papers of the Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity (Birmingham)' -  http://www.Rosetta.bham.ac.uk.

OTHER RESEARCH INTERESTS
I am currently involved in a book project (to be edited with a colleague) which is provisionally titled "Thinking the Materiality of Time: New Marxist Perspectives in Archaeology".

This edited volume of new papers will be based upon two Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) conference sessions. The first: TAG 2010 session "Marxism in Archaeology, reprised": http://www.nomadit.co.uk/tag/tag2010/panels.php5?PanelID=868

The second: "Exploring academic values and concepts: Have archaeologists lost the capacity to talk about inequality?" TAG  2011http://centraltag.wordpress.com/call-for-papers/exploring-academic-values-and-concepts-have-archaeologists-lost-the-capacity-to-talk-about-inequality/
See my 'Papers' page, for further details.

Archaeologists such as Barrett (1994, Fragments from Antiquity), Bradley (1998, Significance of Monuments), Thomas (1996, Time, Culture and Identity), Tilley (1994 Phenomenology of Landscape) and McGuire (1992, A Marxist Archaeology) have been (and remain) influential in my academic development. However, publications by philosophers, anthropologists, human geographers and political activists interest me as much as those of archaeologists.