The contemporary in post-medieval archaeology

Contemporary archaeology is an emerging field of enquiry within the wider discipline associated with the questioning of temporal boundaries in what we study and why we engage with material remains of the recent past more generally. This article argues that contemporary archaeology should be broadly defined at this stage in its development and therefore can be located in Post-Medieval Archaeology through research that explicitly engages with what it is to conduct contemporary archaeology, but also through those implicitly considering how the past intrudes into the present. We believe that Post-Medieval Archaeology will continue to highlight archaeological studies of the contemporary into the future

Dark Heritage

Peer reviewe

Colonial institutions : uses, subversions, and material afterlives

Archaeologically based explorations of colonialism or institutions are common case-studies in global historical archaeology, but the "colonial institution"-the role of institutions as operatives of colonialism-has often been neglected. In this thematic edition we argue that in order to fully understand the interconnected, global world one must explicitly dissect the colonial institution as an entwined, dual manifestation that is central to understanding both power and power relations in the modern world. Following Ann Laura Stoler, we have selected case studies from the Australia, Europe, UK and the USAwhich reveal that the study of colonial institutions should not be limited to the functional life of these institutions-or solely those that take the form of monumental architecture-but should include the long shadow of "imperial debris" (Stoler 2008) and immaterial institutions