The document discusses how car collectors should embrace an archaeological mindset in their collecting. It explains that archaeologists work with what remains from the past by encountering artifacts, organizing collections, and providing care. It advocates thinking of cars and their history through concepts like layering, ruins, and change over time rather than just dates. The document suggests that collectors treat their cars as living parts of the past by keeping them engaged through use and repair rather than just storing pieces staticly. It frames collecting as a collaborative effort that shapes how the past matters to the present and future.

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We’re all archaeologists now
How and why every car collector should embrace their inner archaeological self
Michael Shanks
archaeologist, anthropologist, classicist, digital humanist
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The Revs Program at Stanford
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archaeologists don’t discover the past
they work with what remains

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site | artifact | landscape
encounter | triage | collection | organization | care

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duration | actuality | presence
archaeological times
— think of layering, palimpsest, ruin, entropy, encounter, reanimation, percolation

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active intervention — the animated archive
collective memory — not a record of the past but the act of recollection
put things in a box and they’ll rot — keeping things alive means keeping them in motion
historical significance is always a matter of advocacy
the past is not fixed but dynamic

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experiment — performance — theatre/archaeology
the rearticulation of fragments of the past as real time event
experiences of intervention in the ruin of the past
storytelling is a kind of reanimation

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art and mundanity
always connected in a living past

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coevolution
we are our things

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deep knowledge and the fragment
context means life (things live because they’re connected)
but there are always gaps that require conjecture, restoration, reconstruction, fiction
narrative can fill the gaps

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heritage — legacy
ways the past matters to the present
ways we value the past-in-the-present for-the-future
the challenge of “the archive”

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always collaborative, dispersed, distributed

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some thoughts for the car collector
the car is always an assemblage
think less of dates and more of archaeological time — duration, encounter, presence, care
a living past requires triage, intervention, engagement, mobilization
collecting the past is about choices made for the future
rise to the challenge of the archive — it’s who we are
and it’s always “we”