Archaeology and Ghost Research: A Relational Entanglement

In recent years, there has been a new trope for understanding archaeological practices. This is a movement away from a reliance on a past that is dead, buried, and hidden. This is an archaeology of the contemporary past, a concern for surface remains that involves a dual process of assembling and re-assembling. In ghost research, we can use this contemporary past practice to help us understand a haunting. We do this by assembling socio-cultural entanglements that connect us to similar entanglements from the past. This is creative fieldwork, the making of relational archaeologies that can provide numerous connections that flow out of entangled streams of experience between a collapsed past and present actuality. What emerges is a re-assemblage of what still remains, and haunts us, in those spaces where the past intervenes in the present ("haunted sites").