Engagement: Archaeological Design and Engineering

Practice, architectonics, the disposition of materials, instruments, people, the articulation of heterogeneous parts in an assemblage that performs transformative work: we can easily call this engineering—science in action. One of the main topics of this collection of papers is the design of archaeological knowledge. Taking a lead from these papers, let us ask how we might work with the richness of the past, creatively, respecting the qualities of materials and relationships. From these questions, I sketch a few components in the design of knowledge.