The remains that occupy the landscape today are a mixture of occurred in that landscape in the past of multiple yesterdays. Field archaeology is a systematic excavation that recognizes the role of past events/activities in all future encounters within any given location in a landscape setting. This is a deep ecology containing both physical and cultural elements that continue to haunt the present.
Shallow ecology is contemporary-centered fieldwork with a contemporary bent (the over application of technology in the field) views interaction in relation to presently-observed settings. Deep ecology is an awareness of the multiple human interactions within specific (and different) environs from a cultural, mot merely a physical perspective.
A deep ecological approach digs deep into multiple pasts. It does not view or measure space as a collection of horizontal parameters. At haunted locations, there are networks of cultural phenomena attached to specific physical spaces that are fundamentally connected to individual and collective memory.
Within the deep ecology of a landscape, there are sites that are showcases of both contemporary ruin and a bewildering diversity of pasts. Some of these pasts persist in the form of monuments and museums. Others are locations where the past are only encountered for brief moments that recall cultural memory practices.
The future of one past is in jeopardy. That past is an interactive one. It is a cultural world still haunted by its past. Here, the past is in danger due to a non-resonating approach to those who seek (in their own technological way). What they assume is manifestation from the past.
The present does not meet the past in this technological pursuit of the unknown the past, for the most part, remains buried. In that past, however, life as then known, still goes on to make contact with that past, we must excavate and interact, not just scan and measure this is a different approach to past presence.
The excavation of this past involves its manifesting from an archaeological sensitivity using an ethnographic sensitivity to participate and observation. This is a different mediation. It is a different past than that shown to manifest during paranormal reality TV investigations, or within a “ghost hunt mentality” on ghost tour theatrics, and in “fluffy” ghost books about subjective experience that certainly lack context, process, resonance, immediate field reveals and follow-up!
How can the documentary process of excavation (archaeology) and p.o. (ethnography) transform this present “altered reality” of past presence? That transformation process is the aim of this site. It is a prolegomena to a still open, largely unexcavated, haunted past of interactive presence. It allows a necessary context to be used for excavation of this presence.
G.E. is a workable is a workable path by the science (as the requisites of control, context, and process) and art (the necessities of allowing room for the unexpected, no matter how highly the ‘script’ was written). The past is not just yesterday, nor is it merely the excavation of today. But, today’s work does permit us to continue the work tomorrow.
Through a layered excavation process we have a vertical baseline to begin (and continue) the work by developing and executing resonating cultural scenarios along that baseline (ethnographically-situated), we have established (and maintained) an “identity”. This identity ensures an open communication link that is not only present from the past, but will remain “open” for further excavations in the future. The use of creative modes of engagement (peripatetic audio-video walks, scripted cultural scenarios and the P.O.P. process allowing “immediate reveals”) avoids the exclusive reliance on redundant methods of routine field actions (such as tech sweeps, EVP scans, and monitored ‘watch and wait’) that merely suppress (not initiate) the manifestation of an interactive presence.
Not all of the pasts in a landscape are equal. Like memories, the foundation of a haunting, not are pasts persist or manifest. A haunting, like memory, is not durable. It must be made so! Arch , among others, are responsible for allowing certain pasts to endure. A ghost excavation accomplishes the same thing in an interactive haunting. A “ghost hunt” does not ensure endurance, or cause a manifestation, in most cases.
Implicated in sustaining particular pasts requires an “archaeological metaphysics”. This is a strategy that does not recognize a distinction by the past and present. In the same manner, a a “ghost excavation” unearths, in the same symmetrical space, a particular past, through a specific present, participatory act, which becomes a future manifestation. There is in distinction by the past, present, or future in a “ghost excavation”). This is similar “archaeological metaphysics.” It is an ethno-metaphysics. It is how a particular cultural approach uses and manipulate material remains as unearthed from the past. Accomplishing this give social substance to these former “ghosts”!
The haunted record of a location is not waiting for us to come along and passively document its presence. We achieve the unearthing of a manifesting past cultural presence by actively working on it! This involves cultural resonance…this is the participatory practices of a “ghost excavation”!!
