The following are selected proposals for sessions being planned by scholars at or closely affiliated with Brown University, intended to provide examples for others developing session proposals for TAG-US 2010. This page will be updated with a full list of proposals, as they are submitted and reviewed. For more information on submitting session proposals, please visit the Call for Sessions.

Archaeological Ambulations: Integrative Approaches to Movement
Session Organizers: Oscar Aldred and Bradley M. Sekedat

Questions of movement have started to pervade many of archaeology's discourses on place, space, time, agency, identity and diaspora, society and the social. Attempts to address movement have heretofore been unsuccessful in their implicit acceptance of structural dichotomies such as people/thing, body/mind, movement/pause, permanence/impermanence, etc. Movement for us, however, transcends these dichotomies, and is not only situated in the body, but in the world around; like the body, it continues to transform and age - it is constantly on the move. As such, movement implies both space and time - both wandering and transformation. In this session we seek to fully explore movement through an understanding that the flows of movement not only cross these boundaries but integrate them.

Archaeology without Borders: Disparate Traditions, Convergent Archaeologies, Unscripted Conversations
Session Organizers: Elissa Z. Faro and Krysta Ryzewski

Does a Mayanist think about pots differently than an Aegeanist? Is the anthropological understanding of landscape different than the classical? How do these and other sub-disciplinary divergences and convergences shape theoretical engagements in archaeological practice? This session is inspired by conversations between a small and rather unlikely group of Mediterranean prehistorians, Romanists, and historical archaeologists; these conversations have exposed the problems and potential benefits of translating archaeology, and archaeological theory, across traditionally-defined, seemingly disparate sub-disciplinary specialties. An unconventional topic is complemented in this session by a non-traditional format: a roundtable in which a pairing of two archaeologists from very different backgrounds will engage each other in a dialogue about major topics in archaeological research, such as landscape, material culture, technological processes, urbanization, and embodiment. Departing from a position that the location of theory is everywhere, this session aims to problematize, and hopefully bypass, unproductive distinctions along sub-disciplinary / sub-specialty boundaries.

The Location of Chinese Archaeological Theory
Session Organizers: Roderick Campbell and Rowan Flad

If the internationalization of Chinese archaeology has heralded an explosive growth in new (especially archaeometric) techniques, the development of theory (which informs those techniques and the interpretations that arise from them) has been far less visible. The papers in this session, presented by Mainland Chinese and Taiwanese archaeologists, will reflect on the history and direction of Chinese archaeological thinking and its relationship to theory in Euro-American archaeology. Does the proclaimed ‘universality’ of theory shield underlying Western biases from critical view? Is or should there be an archaeological theory with specifically Chinese characteristics and sensitivities? And how does China’s particular historical experience — with Western Imperialism, with modernism, nationalism, communism, internationalization, and countervailing discourses of cultural uniqueness — shape Chinese archaeology as a discipline?

Locality of Sacrality: Theoretical Approaches to the Emplacement of Religion
Session Organizers: Claudia Moser and Cecelia Feldman Weiss

Ritual and religious practice, when viewed as bound in a network of times, places, and materials, becomes 'emplaced,' revealing the interrelation between sacred and profane spaces, sacred landscapes, hierarchies of places and individuals, as well as the conception of ritual action as a place-making process. This session will consider such issues as the ways in which ritual inscribes itself on the landscape, how sacred spaces conform to, or are shaped by, their natural settings, and how divisions between the sacred and profane manifest themselves ‘in place’.

Subplenary Session: The Location of Theory
Session Organizers: Omur Harmansah and Nicholas Shepherd

This session intends to follow up on the debate opened at the Plenary Session on “the location of theory” in the world of archaeological practice. Through the investigation of in-depth case studies and perspectives from around the world, we hope to offer new reflections on the political economy of knowledge production in archaeology in the context of rethinking coloniality and modernity. Drawing on the theme text posted for the plenary, we invite papers that investigate the various ways in which archaeological theories of the center have “landed”, re-interpreted, hybridized or generated by locally situated archeologies. What kinds of debates and theory-making have taken place in response to local priorities, interests, pressures? How do these situate themselves in relation to metropolitan theory: as resistant forms (forms of counter-theory), or as conversations with it? Studies of the involvement of archaeologists in the micro-politics of various localities they work in can offer valuable insights into situated fieldwork practices, while attempts to see the emergent impact of located archaeologies on central disciplinary discourses are especially encouraged.

Trowel Theologies: Archaeology and the Secular Project
Session Organizer: Ian Straughn

This panel takes up an oversight, or perhaps a strategic avoidance, of archaeology’s loyalty to an underlying principle of modernity: secularism and the secular. If archaeology seeks to embrace forms of alterity (and we should debate whether that is a goal), it will need to come to terms with its secular commitments. To that end, we can ask: what are the roots of a secular orientation within archaeology and how has that continued to shape the professional character of archaeological practice? Who can and can’t be an archaeologist? What aspects of the past might he or she study? Can calls for a multi-vocal archaeology accept the voices of the non-secular interpreter? Can scripture and its exegesis serve as an equally valid ontological starting point or does this fundamentally undermine scholarly authority? Are the implicit metaphysics of archaeology and its theorization of matter/materiality, the body, and the past contradictory to the maintenance of a secular ethos? Has the place of the divine been fully removed from our ontology of things, humans, space and time?

What is Archaeological Ethnography? Locating theory in the Practice of Archaeological Ethnographies
Session Organizer: Morag M. Kersel

Recently Hamilakis and Anagnostopoulos (2009) asked, “What is Archaeological Ethnography?” This TAG session builds upon this provocative question by examining the theoretical paradigms that aid in the production of the archaeological ethnography, and those concepts, which help to define the practice. The emerging trans-disciplinary field of archaeological ethnography weds archaeological agendas with the methodological concerns of cultural/social anthropology. Archaeological ethnographies encourage archaeology to be a socially embedded practice that listens to and at the same time answers to its various constituents, offering a self-reflexive lens for inquiry. Monumental ruins, abandoned landscapes, archaeological sites, sacred spaces, pilgrimage destinations, heritage sites, spaces of spoliation, tourist sites, historically contested places and heterotopias of modernity offer especially inviting platforms for exploring the question of “What is Archaeological Ethnography?”