This document discusses principles for archaeological practice, suggesting that archaeology move away from rigid narratives and models towards a more pragmatic and action-oriented approach. It argues that archaeology should focus on performance, discourse, and collaboration. Some key aspects of this pragmatic approach include mimetics, mediation, reenactment, dramaturgy, improvisation, embodied knowledge, memory, and simulation. Overall, the document advocates starting projects in medias res with a collaborative team focused on creative exploration through play, risk taking, and being willing to fail and try again.

1. archaeology in the making — principles of practice | Michael Shanks

2. archaeological lives

3. what did we find?

4. undermining the power of narrative
no history of ideas
no coherent model of a disciplinary field

5. archaeological imagination — pragmatology
working — techne
political economy — demokratia (the commons)

6. what does this mean for the way we do archaeology?

7. be action oriented — mindful of process
the absence of critical discussion of research management

8. performance and discourse
— some features

9. mimetics — how to represent (the past)

10. mediation — the relation of script or document to action

11. reenactment — repetition or iteration so as to understand or re-present

12. dramaturgy — the arrangement of plot and action

13. scenography
— setting, architecture, context, mise-en-scène,
and the articulation of place/event

14. improvisation — adapting training and skill to unscripted action

15. tacit embodied knowledge and memory
— habits, manners, apprenticeship, techniques of the body involved in any
action or performance

16. memory — as in “theatre/archaeology"
— the rearticulation of fragments of the past as real time event

17. performance as a third space
— where experiment and trials may be attempted

18. rhetoric, as the practice of discourse
— involving the likes of "narratio" (narrative), “dispositio" (arrangement),
“elocutio" (delivery), “memoria” (archive and recall), and tropes such as
parody, satire, irony

19. simulation — illusion and engagement

20. presence

21. co-presence — being mindful of others
— collaborators, cocreators, audience, clients, community

22. aesthetics — think, sense, feel, evaluate
— experience

23. what are the keys to successful pragmatics?

24. start not with abstract principles, but in medias res
— thrown in the midst of things

25. sociality — a team that gets on with each other

26. where "in medias res" refers to "res publica”
— the commons or commonwealth, what we share as community

27. above all the creative confidence to explore, play, risk, fail, and try again

28. pragmatics and project management?
a paradigm in design thinking
(in convergence as the new liberal arts?)

29. design thinking
as the liberal arts?