Archaeology and Ghost Research: A Relational Entanglement - Tapa blanda

In recent years, there has been a new trope for understanding archaeological practices. This is a movement away from a reliance on a past that is dead, buried, and hidden. This is an archaeology of the contemporary past, a concern for surface remains that involves a dual process of assembling and re-assembling. In ghost research, we can use this contemporary past practice to help us understand a haunting. We do this by assembling socio-cultural entanglements that connect us to similar entanglements from the past. This is creative fieldwork, the making of relational archaeologies that can provide numerous connections that flow out of entangled streams of experience between a collapsed past and present actuality. What emerges is a re-assemblage of what still remains, and haunts us, in those spaces where the past intervenes in the present (“haunted sites”).

John Sabol is an archaeologist, cultural anthropologist, actor, and author. As an archaeologist, he has unearthed past material remains in excavations and site surveys in England, Mexico, and at various sites in the United States (including Eastern South Dakota, the Tennessee River Valleys, and in Pennsylvania). His anthropological fieldwork includes the studies of “spirits” in the religious beliefs of the afterlife among various cultural groups in Mexico (Mixtec, Zapotec, Lacandon, Nahuatl, and Otomi). His acting career includes “ghosting” performances of various characters and scenarios in more than 35 movies, TV shows, and documentaries. He has appeared in the A&E TV series, Paranormal State as an investigative consultant. He has written twenty-one books. His recent speaking engagements include the T.A.G. (Theoretical Archaeology Group) Conference at the University of California, Berkeley, at the Space and Place Conference in Prague, Czech Republic, the TAG Conference at the University in Buffalo, New York, Exploring the Extraordinary Conference in York, England, the C.H.A.T. archaeological conference also in York, and the GHost Conference at the University of London, London, England. His investigative reports have been published in such diverse venues as Haunted Times Magazine, Tennessee Anthropologist, and the online journal, ParaAnthropology. He has been a frequent guest on numerous radio and internet talk shows, among them, Beyond the Edge Radio, The Paranormal View, Para X Radio, Blog Talk Radio, The Grand Dark Conspiracy, and Rusty O’Nhiall’s “Mysterious and Unexplained” on PsiFM (Australia). He was a university professor in Mexico for 11 years, teaching both undergraduate and graduate courses on the anthropology of tourism. He has also been featured on public educational TV for U.S. and foreign markets, and has worked on international educational documentaries (in Spain). He has a M.A. in Anthropology/Archaeology (University of Tennessee), and a B.A. in Sociology/Anthropology (Bloomsburg University). He has also attended Penn State University, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of the Americas (Cholula, Puebla, Mexico), and has studied theatre and method acting in Mexico City.