Mark Windsor and Jakub Stejskal: "The Archaeological Sublime"

Mark Windsor, Uppsala University, and Jakub Stejskal, Brno University of Technology: "The Archaeological Sublime"

Abstract
Many of us are fascinated by material remains of humanity’s deep past: we like to read about new archaeological finds and observe them up close in situ or in museums. Such objects characteristically evoke feelings of wonder and awe, and central to this effect is that they carry a sense of profound mystery—they speak to us of human ways of life that we feel are irrevocably out of reach. In this paper, we analyse this experience characteristic of archaeological objects as a variant of the sublime. According to our analysis, the ‘archaeological sublime’ comprises two individually necessary and jointly sufficient moments of imaginative failure: a failure to imagine the temporal distance separating us from an object’s original time, and a failure to accurately imagine an object’s original use context that would ground its meaning as an historical artefact. Finally, we suggest two explanations for why this experience may be a source of pleasure.