In 1966, the conceptual artist John Latham, while teaching at St. Martin's School of Art in London, procured a copy of Clement Greenberg's Art and Culture, and asked his students to chew pages from the volume and spit the pulp into glass vials. The resulting art object "Chew and Spit: Art and Culture" is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City. While certainly irreverent, this action can also be seen as a very profound way of honoring the text in question. Latham's conceptual piece causes one to wonder: Is reading the only acceptable way to engage with text? Aren't books also objects to be felt, smelled, tasted, touched?

  Archaeology is a translational discipline. We often find ourselves, as noted by Anders Andren, negotiating the substantial distance "between artifact and text"¹.  A book can be conceived as a "cognitive artifact,"² but we also interact with them on multiple registers: sensory, emotive, proprioceptive. They are also at times  peripheral entities that warrant our attention only  sporadically. For this response, we chose several archaeology texts to alter in creative ways.


¹Andren, Anders. 1998. Between Artifacts and Texts. New York: Springer.

²Birth, Kevin. 2012. Objects of Time: How Things Shape Temporality. New York: Palgrave.

          Haena Chu