Tim Flohr Sørensen
Biographic Data
| ID | 92816 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tim Flohr Sørensen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tim Flohr |
| FAMILY NAME | Sørensen |
| SIGNATURE | SØRENSEN T F |
| AFFILIATIONS | Sax Institute |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2473-6963 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 456 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Unnaming the common: Landscape Encounters in the Anthropocene
This article explores a particular ruderal landscape in Denmark: Amager Fælled, which is a common located two kilometres from the city centre of Copenhagen, currently embroiled in a fierce controversy over housing development. This controversy is rooted in contested definitions of what counts as nature and what kinds of nature deserve protection. Authorities aiming to redevelop the common as well as organisations working to protect it both operat…
Encounters with otherness and uncertainty: A response to Frieman
I find myself largely in agreement with the argument presented in Frieman's debate article (2024) on knowing and narrativity in archaeology, and I share the author's view of feminist epistemology as key to embracing the conditions of the discipline (see e.g. Pétursdóttir & Sørensen 2023; Sørensen et al. 2024). Here, I consider some of the perspectives that Frieman leaves slightly underexplored
The Mandate for Speculation: Responding to Uncertainty in Archaeological Thinking
The aim of the article is to reframe speculation from being seen as synonymous with unacademic conjecture, or as a means for questioning consensus and established narratives, to becoming a productive practical engagement with the archaeological and responding to its intrinsic uncertainties. In the first part of the article, we offer a review of speculation in the history of archaeological reasoning. In the second part, we proceed to discussing wa…
Insignificants – Speculative Fabulations for the Incidental and Useless
Insignificants was a collecting and exhibition experiment, composed around a series of twelve miniscule installations, mounted monthly between June 2019 and June 2020 (except July 2019). The format of the exhibition series was deliberately neglectable. In an attempt to permit insignificant things to remain precisely insignificant, the installations were conceptually and proportionally limited to a small bell jar exhibited at my department at the …
Archaeological encounters: Ethics and aesthetics under the mark of the Anthropocene
What legitimizes archaeological work in an age of global climate change, socio-political crises and economic recession? On what topics should archaeology focus its research questions, and what forms of archaeological engagement are not merely justifiable but able to make a difference in light of such challenges? Today, there is a tendency, we argue, that archaeological responses to current challenges are expected to align with a specific mode of …
In Visible Presence: The Role of Light in Shaping Religious Atmospheres
This chapter explores the uses and perception of light in religious architecture. Often characterized as an ambiguous materiality—neither concrete and tangible nor distinctly immaterial—light seems to offer itself readily as both matter and metaphor for the divine. We argue in this chapter that this is precisely what happens in contemporary Danish churches, yet not without conflicts between the ideal of immaterial divinity and the need for tangib…
The Triviality of the New Innovation and Impact in Archaeology and Beyond
What drives archaeology? Is it new empirical discoveries, new methods or new theory? These factors combined are the fuel of the discipline, is the obvious answer. However, debates and research articles frequently reveal how a perceived need for novelty, originality and impact tends to disentangle this triumvirate of archaeological virtues, giving precedence to one asset over others as the supposed driving force. Focusing on archaeological theory,…
That Raw and Ancient Cold: On Graham Harman's Recasting of Archaeology
This is a comment to Graham Harman's 2019 response to an article by Þóra Pétursdóttir and Bjørnar Olsen (2018) in which they propose that a materially grounded, archaeological perspective might complement Harman's historical approach in Immaterialism (2016). Harman responds that his book is indeed already more archaeological than historical, stipulating that history is the study of media with a high density of information, whereas archaeology stu…
Agency (again). A response to Lindstrøm and Ribeiro
In this reaction article I reflect on criticism raised by Torill Christine Lindstrøm and Artur Ribeiro in recent issues of this journal. I attempt to identify the source of our disagreement, and focus on three particular aspects of their previous reactions: (1) their framing of agency in Alfred Gell and symmetrical archaeology, (2) their basis for declaring symmetrical archaeology redundant and (3) their identification of the terminology of symme…
Eyes: Archaeology and the Subjective Gaze
The two photo essays that follow and the complementary 14 photographic narratives in the online gallery (available at https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/jca-4-1-online-gallery/) are compiled with the aim of reflecting on the various gazes that are part of the archaeology of the contemporary. The photo essays are based on different premises: while Anna Beck grounds her reflections on repeated explorations of Holmegaard Glassworks in the Summer and Au…
Future World: Anticipatory Archaeology, Materially Affective Capacities and the Late Human Legacy
Using the 2010 film Into Eternity as a springboard for thought, this article considers how archaeologies of the future might help us make sense of how to seek commonality and take care across vast temporal scales. The film, about a nuclear waste repository in Finland, addresses the impossibility of communicating across millennia. In thinking with this film, we engage with recent responses to the post-human call, arguing that they are inadequate i…
Archaeological Paradigms: Pendulum or Wrecking Ball
Let me start by thanking all four commentators for taking time to respond to my article, and for their critical reflections, offering useful and necessary observations: Hallvard Fossheim for delibe
The Two Cultures and a World Apart: Archaeology and Science at a New Crossroads
Within the past decade or so, archaeology has increasingly utilised and contributed to major advances in scientific methods when exploring the past. This progress is frequently celebrated as a quantum leap in the possibilities for understanding the archaeological record, opening up hitherto inaccessible dimensions of the past. This article represents a critique of the current consumption of science in archaeology, arguing that the discipline’s gr…
Deliberate Perspectival Obstructions: Looking at Nothing in Papua New Guinea
This article discusses the collaborative use of what the authors call 'perspectival obstructions'. Taking its outset in the events revolving around a series of challenges given to each other, as well as to their interlocutors, in Papua New Guinea, the article unfolds how obstructions may be tied to a radical shift in perspective that allows partly for the invisible and absent to emerge as visible and present, and for different potentialities of p…
Hammers and nails. A response to Lindstrøm and to Olsen and Witmore
Two contrasting arguments on the merits of symmetrical archaeology and an associated discussion of object agency appeared in a recent issue of Archaeological dialogues (Lindstrøm 2015; Olsen and Witmore 2015). While Torill Christine Lindstrøm extends a thorough, yet hardly new, criticism of the notion of object agency and of symmetrical archaeology, Bjørnar Olsen and Christopher Witmore provide a clarification in its defence (even though their ar…
Materialities of Passing: Explorations in Transformation Transition and Transience
In Praise of Vagueness: Uncertainty, Ambiguity and Archaeological Methodology
Transience and the objects of heritage: A matter of time
Transience and the objects of heritage: a matter of time
Staging atmospheres: Materiality, culture, and the texture of the in-between
More than a feeling: Towards an archaeology of atmosphere
We Have Never Been Latourian: Archaeological Ethics and the Posthuman Condition
This article is motivated by the recent proposal of a ‘symmetrical’ approach in archaeology. Symmetrical archaeology takes its starting point in Bruno Latour's contention that we have – paradoxically – always been able to practice a symmetry between humans and non-humans, and that we have, simultaneously, also always been able to distinguish humans from non-humans. It has been argued by its proponents that symmetrical archaeology has ethical rami…
Original copies: Seriality, similarity and the simulacrum in the Early Bronze Age
This article explores inter-artefactual relations in the Nordic Bronze Age. Notions of copying and imitation have been dominant in the description of a number of bronze and flint artefacts from period I of the Nordic Bronze Age (ca. 1700–1500 BC). It has been argued that local bronze manufacturers copied imported foreign artefacts, and that lithic producers tried to imitate bronze artefacts in flint. This article argues that these archaeological …
Sweet dreams: Biographical blanks and the commemoration of children
In recent years, the commemoration of children and infants has assumed increasingly expressive and conspicuous forms at Danish cemeteries, setting their grave plots apart from the predominant design idiom, otherwise characterised by coherence and modesty, in the form of short biographies of the deceased or by presencing her or his personality. The question, then, is how we are to understand this boisterous mode of commemoration, when the deceased…
A Saturated Void: Anticipating and Preparing Presence in Contemporary Danish Cemetery Culture
Introduction: An Anthropology of Absence
Staging atmospheres: Materiality, culture, and the texture of the in-between
An Anthropology of Luminosity: The Agency of Light
This article addresses the relationship between light, material culture and social experiences. It argues that understanding light as a powerful social agent, in its relationship with people, things, colours, shininess and places, may facilitate an appreciation of the active social role of luminosity in the practice of day-to-day activities. The article surveys an array of past conceptions of light within philosophy, natural science and more rece…
An Anthropology of Absence: Materializations of Transcendence and Loss
Rethinking emotion and material culture
In this article, we wish to return to the suggestion made by Sarah Tarlow a decade ago about the importance of understanding emotions in archaeology as a central facet of human being and human actions. We suggest a further expansion of this that focuses exclusively on the relationship between material culture and emotions (as opposed to textually, verbally or iconographically informed approaches), and offer a vocabulary that may better equip arch…
In Praise of Vagueness: Uncertainty, Ambiguity and Archaeological Methodology
More than a feeling: Towards an archaeology of atmosphere
Flames of transformation: The Role of Fire in Cremation Practices
This paper explores the transformative power of fire, its fundamental ability to change material worlds and affect our experience of its materiality. The paper examines material transformations related to death as a means of illustrating the powerful property of fire as a materially destructive yet socially generative and creative element. While fire has been widely discussed archaeologically as a technological element, and recently coupled with …
The Two Cultures and a World Apart: Archaeology and Science at a New Crossroads
Within the past decade or so, archaeology has increasingly utilised and contributed to major advances in scientific methods when exploring the past. This progress is frequently celebrated as a quantum leap in the possibilities for understanding the archaeological record, opening up hitherto inaccessible dimensions of the past. This article represents a critique of the current consumption of science in archaeology, arguing that the discipline’s gr…
The presence of the dead: Cemeteries, cremation and the staging of non-place
In academic literature, death and the dead are often treated conceptually and with little regard for the aesthetic and tactile experience of the materiality of the corpse. In this way the agency of the dead body is ignored, and the reciprocity between the deceased and the bereaved remains obscured. In effect, the corpse assumes the role of a neutral object, which blurs the particular potency of the dead body's materiality. This article proposes a…
Archaeological encounters: Ethics and aesthetics under the mark of the Anthropocene
What legitimizes archaeological work in an age of global climate change, socio-political crises and economic recession? On what topics should archaeology focus its research questions, and what forms of archaeological engagement are not merely justifiable but able to make a difference in light of such challenges? Today, there is a tendency, we argue, that archaeological responses to current challenges are expected to align with a specific mode of …
Hammers and nails. A response to Lindstrøm and to Olsen and Witmore
Two contrasting arguments on the merits of symmetrical archaeology and an associated discussion of object agency appeared in a recent issue of Archaeological dialogues (Lindstrøm 2015; Olsen and Witmore 2015). While Torill Christine Lindstrøm extends a thorough, yet hardly new, criticism of the notion of object agency and of symmetrical archaeology, Bjørnar Olsen and Christopher Witmore provide a clarification in its defence (even though their ar…
The Triviality of the New Innovation and Impact in Archaeology and Beyond
What drives archaeology? Is it new empirical discoveries, new methods or new theory? These factors combined are the fuel of the discipline, is the obvious answer. However, debates and research articles frequently reveal how a perceived need for novelty, originality and impact tends to disentangle this triumvirate of archaeological virtues, giving precedence to one asset over others as the supposed driving force. Focusing on archaeological theory,…
Future World: Anticipatory Archaeology, Materially Affective Capacities and the Late Human Legacy
Using the 2010 film Into Eternity as a springboard for thought, this article considers how archaeologies of the future might help us make sense of how to seek commonality and take care across vast temporal scales. The film, about a nuclear waste repository in Finland, addresses the impossibility of communicating across millennia. In thinking with this film, we engage with recent responses to the post-human call, arguing that they are inadequate i…
That Raw and Ancient Cold: On Graham Harman's Recasting of Archaeology
This is a comment to Graham Harman's 2019 response to an article by Þóra Pétursdóttir and Bjørnar Olsen (2018) in which they propose that a materially grounded, archaeological perspective might complement Harman's historical approach in Immaterialism (2016). Harman responds that his book is indeed already more archaeological than historical, stipulating that history is the study of media with a high density of information, whereas archaeology stu…
Deliberate Perspectival Obstructions: Looking at Nothing in Papua New Guinea
This article discusses the collaborative use of what the authors call 'perspectival obstructions'. Taking its outset in the events revolving around a series of challenges given to each other, as well as to their interlocutors, in Papua New Guinea, the article unfolds how obstructions may be tied to a radical shift in perspective that allows partly for the invisible and absent to emerge as visible and present, and for different potentialities of p…
Unnaming the common: Landscape Encounters in the Anthropocene
This article explores a particular ruderal landscape in Denmark: Amager Fælled, which is a common located two kilometres from the city centre of Copenhagen, currently embroiled in a fierce controversy over housing development. This controversy is rooted in contested definitions of what counts as nature and what kinds of nature deserve protection. Authorities aiming to redevelop the common as well as organisations working to protect it both operat…
The Mandate for Speculation: Responding to Uncertainty in Archaeological Thinking
The aim of the article is to reframe speculation from being seen as synonymous with unacademic conjecture, or as a means for questioning consensus and established narratives, to becoming a productive practical engagement with the archaeological and responding to its intrinsic uncertainties. In the first part of the article, we offer a review of speculation in the history of archaeological reasoning. In the second part, we proceed to discussing wa…
Insignificants – Speculative Fabulations for the Incidental and Useless
Insignificants was a collecting and exhibition experiment, composed around a series of twelve miniscule installations, mounted monthly between June 2019 and June 2020 (except July 2019). The format of the exhibition series was deliberately neglectable. In an attempt to permit insignificant things to remain precisely insignificant, the installations were conceptually and proportionally limited to a small bell jar exhibited at my department at the …
Special Reviews Section: Urban exploration as archaeological engagement: a review of http://infiltration. org/ -- `the zine about places you're not supposed to go': `Take only photos, leave only footp…
An Anthropology of Luminosity: The Agency of Light
This article addresses the relationship between light, material culture and social experiences. It argues that understanding light as a powerful social agent, in its relationship with people, things, colours, shininess and places, may facilitate an appreciation of the active social role of luminosity in the practice of day-to-day activities. The article surveys an array of past conceptions of light within philosophy, natural science and more rece…
Flames of transformation: The Role of Fire in Cremation Practices
This paper explores the transformative power of fire, its fundamental ability to change material worlds and affect our experience of its materiality. The paper examines material transformations related to death as a means of illustrating the powerful property of fire as a materially destructive yet socially generative and creative element. While fire has been widely discussed archaeologically as a technological element, and recently coupled with …
The presence of the dead: Cemeteries, cremation and the staging of non-place
In academic literature, death and the dead are often treated conceptually and with little regard for the aesthetic and tactile experience of the materiality of the corpse. In this way the agency of the dead body is ignored, and the reciprocity between the deceased and the bereaved remains obscured. In effect, the corpse assumes the role of a neutral object, which blurs the particular potency of the dead body's materiality. This article proposes a…
A Saturated Void: Anticipating and Preparing Presence in Contemporary Danish Cemetery Culture
Introduction: An Anthropology of Absence
An Anthropology of Absence: Materializations of Transcendence and Loss
Talk about the passion
We would like to thank the five commentators for their thorough and stimulating reflections on, and criticism of, our article. The different comments raise various issues, and we appreciate their diversity of perspectives and their analysis of problems in our attempt at a rethinking of emotion in archaeology. The comments are each in their own way highly rewarding for us, and they certainly bring concerns to the fore that we have left out. Here w…
Rethinking emotion and material culture
In this article, we wish to return to the suggestion made by Sarah Tarlow a decade ago about the importance of understanding emotions in archaeology as a central facet of human being and human actions. We suggest a further expansion of this that focuses exclusively on the relationship between material culture and emotions (as opposed to textually, verbally or iconographically informed approaches), and offer a vocabulary that may better equip arch…
Sweet dreams: Biographical blanks and the commemoration of children
In recent years, the commemoration of children and infants has assumed increasingly expressive and conspicuous forms at Danish cemeteries, setting their grave plots apart from the predominant design idiom, otherwise characterised by coherence and modesty, in the form of short biographies of the deceased or by presencing her or his personality. The question, then, is how we are to understand this boisterous mode of commemoration, when the deceased…
Original copies: Seriality, similarity and the simulacrum in the Early Bronze Age
This article explores inter-artefactual relations in the Nordic Bronze Age. Notions of copying and imitation have been dominant in the description of a number of bronze and flint artefacts from period I of the Nordic Bronze Age (ca. 1700–1500 BC). It has been argued that local bronze manufacturers copied imported foreign artefacts, and that lithic producers tried to imitate bronze artefacts in flint. This article argues that these archaeological …
We Have Never Been Latourian: Archaeological Ethics and the Posthuman Condition
This article is motivated by the recent proposal of a ‘symmetrical’ approach in archaeology. Symmetrical archaeology takes its starting point in Bruno Latour's contention that we have – paradoxically – always been able to practice a symmetry between humans and non-humans, and that we have, simultaneously, also always been able to distinguish humans from non-humans. It has been argued by its proponents that symmetrical archaeology has ethical rami…
Transience and the objects of heritage: A matter of time
Transience and the objects of heritage: a matter of time
Staging atmospheres: Materiality, culture, and the texture of the in-between
More than a feeling: Towards an archaeology of atmosphere
In Praise of Vagueness: Uncertainty, Ambiguity and Archaeological Methodology
Hammers and nails. A response to Lindstrøm and to Olsen and Witmore
Two contrasting arguments on the merits of symmetrical archaeology and an associated discussion of object agency appeared in a recent issue of Archaeological dialogues (Lindstrøm 2015; Olsen and Witmore 2015). While Torill Christine Lindstrøm extends a thorough, yet hardly new, criticism of the notion of object agency and of symmetrical archaeology, Bjørnar Olsen and Christopher Witmore provide a clarification in its defence (even though their ar…
Materialities of Passing: Explorations in Transformation Transition and Transience
Eyes: Archaeology and the Subjective Gaze
The two photo essays that follow and the complementary 14 photographic narratives in the online gallery (available at https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/jca-4-1-online-gallery/) are compiled with the aim of reflecting on the various gazes that are part of the archaeology of the contemporary. The photo essays are based on different premises: while Anna Beck grounds her reflections on repeated explorations of Holmegaard Glassworks in the Summer and Au…
Future World: Anticipatory Archaeology, Materially Affective Capacities and the Late Human Legacy
Using the 2010 film Into Eternity as a springboard for thought, this article considers how archaeologies of the future might help us make sense of how to seek commonality and take care across vast temporal scales. The film, about a nuclear waste repository in Finland, addresses the impossibility of communicating across millennia. In thinking with this film, we engage with recent responses to the post-human call, arguing that they are inadequate i…
Archaeological Paradigms: Pendulum or Wrecking Ball
Let me start by thanking all four commentators for taking time to respond to my article, and for their critical reflections, offering useful and necessary observations: Hallvard Fossheim for delibe
The Two Cultures and a World Apart: Archaeology and Science at a New Crossroads
Within the past decade or so, archaeology has increasingly utilised and contributed to major advances in scientific methods when exploring the past. This progress is frequently celebrated as a quantum leap in the possibilities for understanding the archaeological record, opening up hitherto inaccessible dimensions of the past. This article represents a critique of the current consumption of science in archaeology, arguing that the discipline’s gr…
Deliberate Perspectival Obstructions: Looking at Nothing in Papua New Guinea
This article discusses the collaborative use of what the authors call 'perspectival obstructions'. Taking its outset in the events revolving around a series of challenges given to each other, as well as to their interlocutors, in Papua New Guinea, the article unfolds how obstructions may be tied to a radical shift in perspective that allows partly for the invisible and absent to emerge as visible and present, and for different potentialities of p…
Agency (again). A response to Lindstrøm and Ribeiro
In this reaction article I reflect on criticism raised by Torill Christine Lindstrøm and Artur Ribeiro in recent issues of this journal. I attempt to identify the source of our disagreement, and focus on three particular aspects of their previous reactions: (1) their framing of agency in Alfred Gell and symmetrical archaeology, (2) their basis for declaring symmetrical archaeology redundant and (3) their identification of the terminology of symme…
In Visible Presence: The Role of Light in Shaping Religious Atmospheres
This chapter explores the uses and perception of light in religious architecture. Often characterized as an ambiguous materiality—neither concrete and tangible nor distinctly immaterial—light seems to offer itself readily as both matter and metaphor for the divine. We argue in this chapter that this is precisely what happens in contemporary Danish churches, yet not without conflicts between the ideal of immaterial divinity and the need for tangib…
History (23 works) · Archaeology (19 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Art (15 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Aesthetics (12 works) · History (12 works) · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (11 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (11 works) · Linguistics (11 works)