Alfredo González-Ruibal
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3623339 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Alfredo González-Ruibal |
| NOMBRES | Alfredo |
| APELLIDO | González-Ruibal |
| FIRMA | GONZÁLEZ-RUIBAL A |
| AFILIACIONES | Incipit, CSIC, Santiago de Compostela, Spain |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 63 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 392 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 61 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2003 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 11 |
Rise of the Nomad Kings—Pastoral Polities in the Horn of Africa ( a.d. 650–1000)
The archaeology of nomadic societies in northeastern Africa is understudied in comparison with sedentary populations. This is particularly the case in the Horn of Africa. The image of nomadic groups is still quite static, as if they had changed little over the millennia. Recent archaeological research in Somaliland and Djibouti is helping to change this narrative. In this article, we focus on the emergence of nomadic polities that occurred during…
Ruins
The ruins of modernity are the most conspicuous archaeological remains of our era. Here, different kinds of ruins are explored in relation to the processes that produce them: systemic collapse, systemic operation, autophagy, failure and catastrophe. Systemic collapse refers to large-scale, irreversible changes in sociotechnical systems (such as those provoked by indigenous genocides or the end of peasant societies). Other ruins are related to the…
Ethics
Ethics is a central concern in the social sciences today. This chapter scrutinizes the politics underlying the hegemony of ethics and then explores three main themes linking ethics with politics, temporality, affect and materiality. It asks about the ethical responsibilities acquired by archaeologists dealing with the most recent past, particularly in their role as post-witnesses. It then examines the way in which non-historicist notions of archa…
Time
Supermodernity is characterized by three excesses: of time, space and materiality. In this chapter, the first of these three excesses is tackled. Temporal excess is manifested in presentism—the overwhelming relevance of the present over all other times; in acceleration and hypereventfulness, and in the very annihilation of time—through genocide, ethnocide and memoricide. However, the contemporary era is still one of many different temporalities w…
Aesthetics
The archaeology of the contemporary past requires a particular way of telling and manifesting things—a different aesthetics. In this chapter, the potential of Jacques Rancière’s idea of the aesthetic regime of art is explored to understand contemporary archaeology’s aesthetics. It is defended that both regimes (of art and archaeology) work aesthetically through parataxis—the juxtaposition of apparently unrelated phenomena, objects, or ideas—only …
Space
This chapter addresses some of the characteristics of supermodern spatiality: the extraordinary expansion of anthropogenic space; growing spatial impoverishment, which occurs at different levels—horizontally, vertically and temporally—and has a very physical dimension; the proliferation of ephemeral space, which is associated with both dominant and counterhegemonic practices; the creation of new, durable barriers and border zones; forced displace…
Concluding remarksBeyond the Anthropocene
The concluding chapter summarises some of the main points of the text and proposes a contemporary archaeology that contributes to define the supermodern age without being constrained by the conceptual framework of the Anthropocene.
Politics
Politics play a pivotal role in the archaeology of the contemporary past. But not all politics are the same. It is argued here that the stance of some contemporary archaeology is actually closer to what can be defined as post-politics or soft politics. Multiculturalism, localism, the celebration of choice, and the political agnosticism of some neomaterialist perspectives are all related to the practice of soft politics. In this chapter, five oper…
An archaeology of the contemporary era
Materiality
This chapter examines the third excess of supermodernity: material excess. It starts by defining the nature of the materiality studied by archaeologists of the contemporary past. Most of it is banal and familiar, so familiar that we no longer notice it. The concept of infraordinary, coined by French writer Georges Perec, encapsulates the sensibility needed to approach the materiality of the everydayness and its repetitious excess. The material ex…
An Archaeology of the Contemporary Era
The second edition of An Archaeology of the Contemporary Era explores the period between the late nineteenth and twenty-first centuries and reflects on the archaeological theory and practice of the recent past.This book argues that the materiality of our times, and particularly its ruins and rubbish, reveals something profound and disturbing about modern societies. It examines the political, ethical, aesthetic, and epistemological foundations of …
An archaeology of the Pomeranian Crime of 1939
An archaeology of the Pomeranian Crime of 1939' is a multidisciplinary scientific project that focuses on collecting the material evidence of the Nazi German mass execution committed in the first months of the Second World War in the Gdańsk Pomerania region in Poland. Since 2023, it has excavated mass graves containing material evidence of crimes against humanity
Making and unmaking the state in the Horn of Africa
In this article, I intend to use archaeology’s understanding of deep time and infrastructure to explore the ways in which state-making has been challenged in the Horn of Africa during the last two millennia. I will take a long-term approach to state ecology and state resistance so as to eschew the presentist bias that is all too frequent in political analyses, particularly in Africa, and that prevents us from understanding some of the deep underc…
Excavating Europe’s last fascist monument
Since 1945, most fascist monuments have disappeared or been deactivated in Western Europe. There is one in Spain, however, that remains fully operative: the Valley of the Fallen. The complex, devised by the dictator Francisco Franco, celebrates the Nationalist victory in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), keeps the bodies of thousands of victims of the conflict, as well as the leading fascist ideologue and the dictator himself, and provides a mat…
Nomads Trading with Empires
This article presents new data from fieldwork in the de facto state of Somaliland, a region in the Horn of Africa historically inhabited by nomadic pastoralists who played a key role in commercial exchange from the first century BCE onward. Relations between ancient empires and nomadic populations have received comparatively little attention in relation to other groups living within or outside imperial boundaries. Our understanding of these inter…
Los reinos perdidos. Arqueología del estado en el Cuerno de África
El Cuerno de África fue la cuna de los estados más antiguos del África Subsahariana, pero son escasamente conocidos y raramente se tienen en cuenta en discusiones generales sobre el origen de las sociedades jerarquizadas y las formaciones estatales. Sin embargo, durante tres milenios, el Cuerno fue testigo de la emergencia, desarrollo y colapso de diferentes organizaciones estatales, las cuales con frecuencia contradicen nuestras concepciones de …
Asia in the Horn. The Indian Ocean trade in Somaliland
The Indian Ocean trade in the Horn of Africa during the Middle Ages has received much less attention than in other regions of the Islamic world, such as the Gulf and East Africa. The Horn is still too often represented as a void in maps showing routes and distributions of trade goods. In this article we present the results of archaeological surveys conducted between 2016 and 2020 in places of trade around Berbera, one of the main Red Sea ports in…
Subaltern assemblages. The archaeology of marginal places and identities
Interest in marginal lives has increased steadily in archaeology since the 1980s. Post-processual archaeology brought attention to the diversity of social experiences that were often invisibilised ...
The cosmopolitan borderland
The western Ethiopian borderland is remote from all centres of power in the Horn of Africa. As a result, local communities have often been regarded by scholars and state agents alike as isolated and antiquated. The picture that emerges from archaeological research, however, is more complex: borderland societies have, at different times from the mid first millennium AD onwards, embraced, reworked or rejected innovations from neighbouring polities.…
“Public” and Archaeology
Contemporary Past, Archaeology of the
Criado-Boado, Felipe
Supermodernity and Archaeology
Ethical Issues in Indigenous Archaeology
The critique of archaeology made from an indigenous and postcolonial perspective has been largely accepted, at least in theory, in many settler colonies, from Canada to New Zealand. In this paper, I would like to expand such critique in two ways: on the one hand, I will point out some issues that have been left unresolved; on the other hand, I will address indigenous and colonial experiences that are different from British settler colonies, which…
The Dats'in
The Dats’in are an indigenous minority group living on the Sudanese-Ethiopian borderland. They passed unnoticed to researchers, administrators and the wider world until 2013, when the authors of this paper met them in the lowlands of Qwara (NW Ethiopia). They speak an undocumented Nilo-Saharan language, related to Gumuz, and share important cultural and social traits with other indigenous communities in the area, while at the same time remaining …
Reclaiming Archaeology
Ontology of the self and material culture
Against reactionary populism
From Brazil to the United Kingdom, 2016 was a critical year in global politics. Heritage, ethics and the way that archaeologists relate to the public were and will all be affected, and it is time to reflect critically on the phenomenon of 'reactionary populism' and how it affects the practice and theory of archaeology. 'Reactionary populism' can be defined as a political form that is anti-liberal in terms of identity politics (e.g. multiculturali…
Beyond the Anthropocene
The question of the Anthropocene has gained increased notoriety among archaeologists recently. Precisely because of that, it is in need of thorough critique. The aim of this article is not to rule out the concept of Anthropocene, but to point out some of its problems: the relationship of Anthropocenic discourses with the emergence of an all-embracing biopolitical science; the inadequacies of the term, which blames all humans equally for a specifi…
Some Reflections on Heritage and Archaeology in the Anthropocene
Are we now living in a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene? Geo-scientists discuss whether there is a need for a new concept covering the last 250 years' immense human impact on the earth. How are we going to understand and define ‘heritage’ and archaeology in a rapidly changing global environment? The ‘linguistic turn’ in humanities and social sciences has had a huge impact on both archaeology and heritage studies since c. 1980. A criti…
Ethics of Archaeology
Ethics has abandoned its niche status to become a shared concern across archaeology. The appraisal of the sociopolitical context of archaeological practice since the 1980s has forced the discipline to take issue with the expanding array of ethical questions raised by work with living people. Thus, the original foci on the archaeological record, conservation, and scientific standards, which are behind most deontological codes, have been largely tr…
The fair and the sanctuary
Gathering places play a paramount role among pastoralists. Markets, sanctuaries, graves and watering places are foci of ritual, economic and social activity. They facilitate inter and intragroup relations, including trade, marriage arrangements, political alliances, conflict resolution ceremonies, the dispersal of news and religious activities. In this article the authors will explore two types of gathering places used by nomadic pastoralists in …
An Archaeology of the Contemporary Era
The second edition of An Archaeology of the Contemporary Era explores the period between the late nineteenth and twenty-first centuries and reflects on the archaeological theory and practice of the recent past.This book argues that the materiality of our times, and particularly its ruins and rubbish, reveals something profound and disturbing about modern societies. It examines the political, ethical, aesthetic, and epistemological foundations of …
An Archaeology of Resistance
An Archaeology of Resistance: Materiality and Time in an African Borderland studies the tactics of resistance deployed by a variety of indigenous communities in the borderland between Sudan and Ethiopia. The Horn of Africa is an early area of state formation and at the same time the home of many egalitarian, small scale societies, which have lived in the buffer zone between states for the last three thousand years. For this reason, resistance is …
Genealogies of Destruction
Exploring long distance trade in Somaliland (AD 1000–1900)
Somaliland was a key region in the trade routes connecting the Mediterranean, the Middle East and the Indian Ocean from antiquity to the nineteenth century. However, little archaeological work on this topic has been carried out in the region to date. A new project by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) intends not only to assess the role of Somaliland in the Indian Ocean network, but also to understand the participation of local communit…
Asia in the Horn. The Indian Ocean trade in Somaliland
The Indian Ocean trade in the Horn of Africa during the Middle Ages has received much less attention than in other regions of the Islamic world, such as the Gulf and East Africa. The Horn is still too often represented as a void in maps showing routes and distributions of trade goods. In this article we present the results of archaeological surveys conducted between 2016 and 2020 in places of trade around Berbera, one of the main Red Sea ports in…
From the battlefield to the labour camp
The author explores responses to political violence through the materiality of three aspects of the Civil War in Spain: military lines in the battle for Madrid, a concentration camp in Extremadura and a remote settlement of forced labourers and their families. He shows how archaeology's revelations reflect, qualify and enrich the story of human survival under the pall cast by a dictatorship. Sharing the inquiry with the public of today also revea…
Ethical Issues in Indigenous Archaeology
The critique of archaeology made from an indigenous and postcolonial perspective has been largely accepted, at least in theory, in many settler colonies, from Canada to New Zealand. In this paper, I would like to expand such critique in two ways: on the one hand, I will point out some issues that have been left unresolved; on the other hand, I will address indigenous and colonial experiences that are different from British settler colonies, which…
Ethnoarchaeology or simply archaeology
In this comment I argue that ethnoarchaeology is not the only means for an archaeological engagement with living traditional communities. I suggest that some practices can be better labelled ‘archaeology of the present’, due to their lack of interest in providing analogical frameworks of inspiration for archaeology. Instead, the archaeology of the present aims to better understand living societies by using archaeological methods and theories. Rat…
The dream of reason
Modernity is central to the concept of archaeology. It is not only part and parcel of the modern project, but it also throws light on the constitution of modernity itself. Although archaeologists usually reveal the higher degrees of oppression and alienation brought by the modern world, they consider that modernity is, in the first place, a productive process, in that it gives rise to new things - be they good or bad. They also tend to consider i…
A social archaeology of colonial war in Ethiopia
EN] The archaeology of twentieth-century warfare, with its focus on Western armies and military issues, has often neglected indigenous experiences of war and social aspects, particularly the role of women in reproducing culture through material practices in situations of great distress. In this article, we propose a postcolonial examination of imperialistic war in Ethiopia. We study the cave of Zeret, the refuge of a large guerrilla group that wa…
Nomads Trading with Empires
This article presents new data from fieldwork in the de facto state of Somaliland, a region in the Horn of Africa historically inhabited by nomadic pastoralists who played a key role in commercial exchange from the first century BCE onward. Relations between ancient empires and nomadic populations have received comparatively little attention in relation to other groups living within or outside imperial boundaries. Our understanding of these inter…
Subaltern assemblages. The archaeology of marginal places and identities
Interest in marginal lives has increased steadily in archaeology since the 1980s. Post-processual archaeology brought attention to the diversity of social experiences that were often invisibilised ...
Malos nativos. una crítica de las arqueologías indígenas y poscoloniales
Las arqueologías poscoloniales y la arqueología indígena, se han convertido en un paradigma dominante al que es difícil criticar sin arriesgarse a ser criticado por ir contra los intereses de las comunidades originarias. Es necesaria una crítica de este paradigma para comprender la relación entre arqueólogos y grupos indígenas, el funcionamiento del capitalismo y las falsas representaciones del otro. Defiendo que las arqueologías indígenas sufren…
Making and unmaking the state in the Horn of Africa
In this article, I intend to use archaeology’s understanding of deep time and infrastructure to explore the ways in which state-making has been challenged in the Horn of Africa during the last two millennia. I will take a long-term approach to state ecology and state resistance so as to eschew the presentist bias that is all too frequent in political analyses, particularly in Africa, and that prevents us from understanding some of the deep underc…
The cosmopolitan borderland
The western Ethiopian borderland is remote from all centres of power in the Horn of Africa. As a result, local communities have often been regarded by scholars and state agents alike as isolated and antiquated. The picture that emerges from archaeological research, however, is more complex: borderland societies have, at different times from the mid first millennium AD onwards, embraced, reworked or rejected innovations from neighbouring polities.…
Late hunters of western Ethiopia
The dual model of foragers versus producers is increasingly perceived as inadequate for understanding the complexities of subsistence practices in the past and in the present. A wide spectrum of in-between strategies, falling under the label ‘low-level food production’ (Smith 2001), has been pointed out. Africa has, however, remained mostly outside this debate, despite offering many examples of societies that combine hunting and gathering with fo…
An archaeology of the Pomeranian Crime of 1939
An archaeology of the Pomeranian Crime of 1939' is a multidisciplinary scientific project that focuses on collecting the material evidence of the Nazi German mass execution committed in the first months of the Second World War in the Gdańsk Pomerania region in Poland. Since 2023, it has excavated mass graves containing material evidence of crimes against humanity
The Dats'in
The Dats’in are an indigenous minority group living on the Sudanese-Ethiopian borderland. They passed unnoticed to researchers, administrators and the wider world until 2013, when the authors of this paper met them in the lowlands of Qwara (NW Ethiopia). They speak an undocumented Nilo-Saharan language, related to Gumuz, and share important cultural and social traits with other indigenous communities in the area, while at the same time remaining …
Restoring Ontological Security
The dream of reason
Modernity is central to the concept of archaeology. It is not only part and parcel of the modern project, but it also throws light on the constitution of modernity itself. Although archaeologists usually reveal the higher degrees of oppression and alienation brought by the modern world, they consider that modernity is, in the first place, a productive process, in that it gives rise to new things - be they good or bad. They also tend to consider i…
Comercio mediterráneo en el castro de Montealegre (Pontevedra, Galicia). Siglo II a.C. – inicios del s. I d. C
El castro de Montealegre, en la costa de Galicia, ha proporcionado en recientes excavaciones un interesante conjunto de importaciones mediterráneas, de mediados del siglo II a.C. a inicios del siglo I d.C. principalmente. El comercio tardopúnico y romano preaugusteo en el noroeste ibérico era hasta hace poco escasamente conocido, frente a las relaciones comerciales del período julio-claudio. Los objetos que llegaron a este finis térrea incluyen á…
Vernacular cosmopolitanism
Vernacular Cosmopolitanism
Throughout this chapter I argue that our concern for others, as archaeologists, has been caught up in the neoliberal rhetoric of development, which helps to maintain and justify, in the long term, the inequalities it purports to alleviate. Moreover, some archaeological preconceptions in the past and some research strategies in the present have helped, in a conscious or unconscious way, to construct indigenous communities as dispensable or improva…
Genealogies of Destruction
The Archaeology of Internment in Francoist Spain (1936–1952)
Some Reflections on Heritage and Archaeology in the Anthropocene
Are we now living in a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene? Geo-scientists discuss whether there is a need for a new concept covering the last 250 years' immense human impact on the earth. How are we going to understand and define ‘heritage’ and archaeology in a rapidly changing global environment? The ‘linguistic turn’ in humanities and social sciences has had a huge impact on both archaeology and heritage studies since c. 1980. A criti…
A social archaeology of colonial war in Ethiopia
EN] The archaeology of twentieth-century warfare, with its focus on Western armies and military issues, has often neglected indigenous experiences of war and social aspects, particularly the role of women in reproducing culture through material practices in situations of great distress. In this article, we propose a postcolonial examination of imperialistic war in Ethiopia. We study the cave of Zeret, the refuge of a large guerrilla group that wa…
In praise of depth
I am totally for the archaeology in and of the present that Rodney Harrison defends in his powerful text. In fact, I have defended a similar idea elsewhere, although in a rather less eloquent and straightforward way. I have suggested that we could transform ethnoarchaeology, an archaeological subdiscipline that already deals with the present, into a true 'archaeology of the present . . . that . . . deals with people that are alive and things that…
Ontology of the self and material culture
Layla Renshaw. Exhuming loss
Layla Renshaw. Exhuming loss: memory, materiality and mass graves of the Spanish Civil War. 260 pages, 14 illustrations. 2011. Walnut Creek (CA): Left Coast; 978-1-61132-041-1 hardback 34.95; 978-1-61132-043-5 e-book. - Volume 86 Issue 332
Fractalidad, materialidad y cultura
ES] En este artículo defenderemos que existe una relación de escala (fractal) y no de determinación entre los rasgos que presenta una cultura y la forma de ser de las personas de un grupo dado. Se sostendrá que lo que denominamos ¿cambio cultural¿ constituye una transformación de la manera en que las personas se relacionan con el mundo y que entre esas relaciones se incluye de forma significativa la sostenida con los objetos. Se defiende, por tan…
The Fourth Threshold
Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal David Clarke (1973) described a process of loss of disciplinary innocence in archaeology, where he identified three thresholds, characterized as stages of consciousness, sel
From the battlefield to the labour camp
The author explores responses to political violence through the materiality of three aspects of the Civil War in Spain: military lines in the battle for Madrid, a concentration camp in Extremadura and a remote settlement of forced labourers and their families. He shows how archaeology's revelations reflect, qualify and enrich the story of human survival under the pall cast by a dictatorship. Sharing the inquiry with the public of today also revea…
Reclaiming Archaeology
Epilogue
Ch02. Ecology of a Shatter Zone
Ch05. Of Mimicry and Mao
Ch04. Between Domination and Resistance
Index
Ch03. Direct Action against the State
Ch01. Time and Materiality
Ethics and the Archaeology of Violence
Contemporary Past, Archaeology of the
History (42 obras) · Archaeology (36 obras) · Art (29 obras) · Sociology (29 obras) · History (22 obras) · Political science (21 obras) · Geography (18 obras) · Law (17 obras) · Politics (17 obras) · Philosophy (16 obras)