Archaeologies of Emergent Presents and Futures

This article traces the genealogy of the subfield that has become known as the “archaeology of the contemporary past” and argues for its more thorough integration with an expanded field of historical archaeology. One of the central challenges for archaeology over the coming decades will be to find a way to engage with emerging, contemporary, sociomaterial phenomena and, hence, with issues of both contemporary and future ecological, social, political, and economic concern. Drawing on the framework for a new internationally collaborative, interdisciplinary research project, Heritage Futures, that seeks to understand the material-discursive processes of heritage and other heritage-like fields as distinctive forms of future-assembling practices through the application of a range of archaeological ethnographic methods, the article concludes that the potential for an expanded field of historical archaeology lies in its ability to engage with emergent futures by way of archaeological ethnographies that are attuned to the sociomaterial aspects of these and other future-assembling practices.