The Age of Excess: excavating supermodernity

The beginning of the twentieth century witnessed the birth of a new kind of modernity: one characterized by an excess of time, space, self-reflexive individuality and matter. For this reason, we can define the period that started in 1914 as supermodernity, using the concept coined by French anthropologist Marc Aug. In this talk, I will suggest some lines of research for an archaeology of supermodern excess. Although the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are studied by the archaeology of the contemporary past, which has expanded much during the last decade, archaeologists have tended to focus primarily on the Western world. Here, I will try to show that archaeology can be a powerful tool for revealing the negative effects of supermodernity at a global scale, including the mass-destruction of the environment and the annihilation of nonmodern communities.