Surface Collection: Archaeological Travels in Southeast Asia

Notwithstanding the word "surface" in its title, this is a book about the underground, a perfectly appropriate subject for an archaeologist. Like many of my colleagues, I began my career with a much clearer faith in the distinction between the underground and the surface than I have now. What happened to unsettle that distinction was partly an increasing interest in the more recent past, even in what is now termed the "contemporary past." In that sense, having spent the first part of my career focusing on the prehistoric past, I've since ascended, stratigraphically, toward the surface. Relevant to this, no doubt, is that fact that I have worked primarily in the area of archaeological heritage conservation. As we all know, over the past few decades Indigenous peoples and voices from the non-West in general have been insisting that the past and present are a lived continuum. Cutting across the niceties of absolute dating and stratigraphic sequencing, they seem to regard the past as always-already immanent in the present. Ancient objects are not, for them, inert historical matter, but have agency, efficacy, and personality of various kinds. This idea of a "vital" material past collapses the distinction between the underground and the on-ground. Relative time depth and depth below the surface provide no index of people's intimacy with objects from the past. More relevant to this book, however, is a notion of the underground as a hidden dimension of the surface.