Schedule Details – EAA Annual Meeting 2026

August 28, 2026 | 2:00 PM - 6:30 PM
436

28 - Archaeology as Performance: Excavating, Displaying, and Reimagining the Past

Regular session Public Archaeology Community

Historically regarded as a discipline of collection, documentation, and interpretation, archaeology has increasingly embraced the embodied, spatial, and dramaturgical dimensions of its practice. Since the 1990s, performance archaeology has challenged traditional paradigms by conceiving the excavation site not merely as a source of data, but as a temporal and material stage where knowledge, presence, and representation intersect.
This session explores how performative approaches to archaeology open new spaces for reflection and experimentation, renewing our relationship with existing structures, heritage sites, and historical objects. By engaging with immersive devices, situated narratives, in situ activation protocols, and contemporary technologies of capture and representation—such as moving images, sound, and 3D modeling—these practices transform excavation into a form of spatial storytelling and embodied knowledge. Stratigraphy, tools, and site protocols become scenographic elements that communicate research in real time, revealing the excavation as a performance that speaks as much to the present as to the past.
The session aims to examine this performative turn in archaeological practice, foregrounding the convergence of excavation, scenography, and spatial design. It will interrogate key questions: How does a site become a space for narratives? How does an artifact acquire agency within contemporary debates? Which voices, memories, and experiences are excluded, and how might they be rendered tangible?
We invite contributions that engage with these themes and propose innovative approaches to archaeology as an embodied, critical, and experimental field—one capable of reimagining memory, materiality, and narrative through performative methods and creative research.