From Myth-Work to Grief Work

Is there a sense in which archaeological artefacts can be activated within the present, perhaps even to call forth different futures? This article involves a personal account – alongside archaeological analysis (and some theoretical speculation) – of an encounter with the Folkton Drums and how a kind of “re-versioning” of them in and for the present allows other affects and meanings to foreground themselves. At stake here especially is a relationship to grief, but also the way in which landscape and community are linked to different devices – such as the drums – both in the past but also in our contemporary moment too. The essay moves between an academic/scholarly mode and a more auto style of writing – the rationale here being that the work of the drums is itself of an intimate and personal character and thus, to a certain extent, calls for a different kind of engagement and writing that is appropriate to this work.