Michael Shanks

For c.v. please visit Professor Shanks' website.

Archaeologists don't discover the past - they work on what remains.

recent projects

• Bibliotheca Universalis Antiquaria. An international research network exploring the antiquarian tradition in the context of the history of science.

• Binchester Roman Town (Hadrian's Wall UK): excavations, summer school and research into the edges of the Roman Empire - http://vinovium.org

• CARS (Center for Automotive Research at Stanford) - human-centered design in a new collaboration between the schools of Engineering and Humanities at Stanford

• The Presence Project - understanding the presence of the past, the performance of presence, the presence effect of cultural memory - with sixteen of the world's foremost perfomance artists - 2005-2009 - $500k funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK

• Life to the second power - building a memory palace with artist Lynn Hershman in the virtual world Second Life - 2006-2007 - $60k funding from the Langlois Foundation

• Cocreating Cultural Heritage - new models for the collaborative creation of archaeology and history - 2006-2007 - $50k funding from the Wallenberg Foundation

• The archaeology of car design - mobile media and the car interior of 2015 - an experimental project applying Classical Archaeology to predictive cultural modeling - 2005-2006 - $60k funding from DaimlerChrysler

• Metamedia Lab. Archaeological research in media materialities and design history. metamedia.stanford.edu

current writing

• Book. Ten Things: An Archaeology of Design.

• Book. Archaeology: the Discipline of Things. With Bjornar Olsen, Chris Witmore and Tim Webmoor. A broad treatment connecting archaeology with anthropologies and philosophies of materiality and with design thinking. California University Press, 2009.

• Book. Archaeologists with Attitude: Michael Shanks and William Rathje in conversation with Sue Alcock, Lewis Binford, Victor Buchli, John Cherry, Meg Conkey, Ian Hodder, Kristian Kristiansen, Mark Leone, Randall McGuire, Lynn Meskell, Mary and Adrian Praetzellis, Colin Renfrew, Michael Schiffer, Alain Schnapp, Patty Jo Watson, Alison Wylie. Debating the current state of archaeology. Chicago.