Dionisios K. Kavadias

Sociocultural Anthropology

Regional focus: Greece.

Topical interests: Folk positivism, politics of culture, folk archaeology, semiotics, material culture, globalization.

Illegible stone inscriptions written by the hand of Odysseus, gold-laden burials in mountain top caves, and ancient sources of lethal compounds unknown to today's chemists. In a kind of homespun archaeology, these interpretations by rural Greeks endow places and things with a historical significance not recognized by any formally disciplined archaeologist, mostly because the archaeological "site" is either undocumented or because it isn't actually archaeological.

Rather than examine discourses on archaeological sites of conventional renown, I choose to examine a more localized discourse of archaeological sites that are undocumented or imaginary; undocumented because they evade the attention of authoritative archaeologists, or imaginary because they are not actually artifacts of the human past. Hence, these sites escape the tourism industry and therefore are appropriated by locals as familiar folk symbols of "intact," unglobalized, and unexploited local tradition. Secondly, these unstudied sites exist in the local imaginary free from academic and governmental programs which may otherwise preempt indigenous interpretation and representation of archaeological meaning.

Bearing the dirt scars of a former archaeologist and armed with the absorbent notebook of an ethnographer, I hypothesize that in "folk archaeology" rural Greeks entextualize locally recognized archaeological sources as political constructions of tradition responsive to globalization, nostalgia, modernity, and cultural (re)production.