Archaeologies of a Future That Never Happened
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 26/03/2019

The archaeological imagination shapes the public image of the past, but also ours. This happens in a context in which we look at the past thinking about the present (even from a traditional ethnoarchaeological approach), trying to understand our current selves better from the historical journey we have undertaken as species and societies. What if we could do that looking into the future? As well as we imagine the past, humanity has imagined the future in very different ways, but with a common basis and goal: how we want to be, or what will be of us if we do not change. Our imagination of the future portrays a dystopian image of our current selves that can go very well or, usually, very wrong. Most of them already belong to the past. Futures imagined decades ago for realities that we have already lived. Can an archaeological analysis of these futures that never happened help to understand who we are, what we want and, more interestingly for our professional development, how do we think of change and time? I will try to sketch out some lines on this issue with different examples from paper and screen. 

Jaime Almansa Sanchez (JAS Arqueologia S.L.U)