Books


AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF A HAUNTED LIBRARY

I don’t live in a house. I sleep there. I experience life outside the walls of a “home”. Because I am an archaeologist, I encounter that life away from my “home turf”. I do frequent, however, a certain space in the house where I study, analyze, and write about those outside experiences. It is my “memory room”, my study. It is where the haunting originates, and the ghosts dwell. Because of these frequent “visitations”, my house is not haunted, my “memory room” is!

Because I don’t live my life here, I am not overtly concerned about visual presence, luxurious surroundings, or creature comforts. I “dwell” on dwelling in spaces where my memories can re-emerge. The décor of my surroundings are inhabited by “trigger objects”, posted conveniently around the “memory room”. This allows the haunting to emerge. Others may call them “mementos”, or a more sophisticated gaze may label them “museum pieces”. They are the material remains of my journeys, both physical and imagined. They are reminders of the fieldwork, the “still points” for my writing.

I do not build this “memory museum” to impress others. I do not collect arbitrarily to bolster ego or sales. The material culture in the house is a “home” for my archaeological (layered time) and ethnographic (culturally-expressive) moments. They stimulate my haunted mind, but they are not a “haunted museum” (like that of John Zaffis). They are the remains of excavations that I store in this “laboratory”, my “haunted house”. They are collected after memory practices in the field are completed, sometimes reiterating a past performance. They are stored as “artifacts” of past cultural presence in my books.

These books become the haunted library for my haunted house. Anyone can “check them out”, read their content, and enter my haunted house. If they truly understand the meaning and intent that I have expressed, they can leave ordinary reality and enter the inner recesses of expanded experience. This “museum”, and my books, is interactive. They must be! Only then can it be a haunted moment. This is no technological innovation. It was invented by Gutenberg centuries ago. It is a social exchange between a “ghost” and his audience. It becomes a site-specific performance in the haunted theatre at the reading of the first page………..

 

 

Battlefield Hauntscape: The Unearthing of Gettysburg, July 1863

 

Bodies of Substance, Fragments of Memories: An Archaeological Sensitivity to Ghostly Presence

 

Digging-Deep: An Archaeologist Unearths a Haunted Life

 

Gettysburg Unearthed: The Excavation Of A Haunted History

 

Ghost Culture: Theories, Context, and Scientific Practice

 

Ghost Excavator: Unearthing the Drama in the Mine Fields

 

Phantom Gettysburg: Alternative Histories on a Civil War Battlefield

 

The Anthracite Coal Region: The Archaeology of its Haunting Presence

 

The Politics of Presence: Haunting Performances on the Gettysburg Battlefield

 

 

The Re-Haunting(s) of Gettysburg: Ghost Archaeology and the Multiple Fields of Presence

 

The Haunted Theatre

 

Digging Up Ghosts:  Unearthing Past Presences At A Haunted Location

 

 

Haunting Archaeologies: The Still Unexcavated Fields

 

Ghost Culture Too:  Expanding the Contemporary Reality of Past Interactive Interactions


Burnside Bridge:  The Excavation of a Civil War Soundscape

 

Beyond the Paranormal:  Learning From the Past at Haunted Locations

 

The Gettysburg Experience:  Contemporary Realities of the Past as a Civil War Battlefield

 

The Absence Above, A Presence Below:  Re-Envisioning Centralia, Pennsylvania

 

 

The Ghost Excavation:  An Ethnography of a Haunted Site

 

The Good Death and The Civil War:  The Haunting of an American Battlefield

Centralia:  A Vision of Ruin

The Production of   Haunted Space:  Its Meaning and Excavation

Altered States:  Making the Extraordinary Ordinary Again

Anthracite Heritage:  A Still “Unmined” Landscape

Archaeology and Ghost Research:  A Relational Entanglement

Performances in Haunted Space:  An “Afterlife” in Ruin

Haunting Presences, Ruins, and Ghostly Entanglements: 

Excavations at the Edge of Performance

The Afterlife of Centralia: 

Presences in a Landscape of Destruction

Centralia Pennsylvania:  The Fiction That Fuels The Fire