Imagination has informed ‘the writing of the past’ since the birth of European antiquarianism. However, the prominence and reputation of the archaeological imagination has fluctuated greatly through time. Both a product of its times and a force for change, the archaeological imagination has been variously central to the discipline, marginalized, and ridiculed. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, antiquarians such as John Leland, John Aubrey, and William Stukeley referenced druids, proto-Christianity, and classical Rome to creatively people England’s past, producing past worlds that ‘made sense’ in the context of the nationalist politics and religious mores of the time (Daniel 1981; Piggott 1985; Trigger 1989). By contrast, the tendency towards empirical study squeezed imagination to the margins of mid-twentieth-century processual archaeology (Hodder 1989). This chapter picks up some threads of the story of archaeological imagination as it has been ‘written’ during the last few decades, as well as reflecting on some opportunities for the future, specifically in the study of death, mourning, and emotion. In recent years, many archaeologists have experimented with different styles of writing in an attempt to give faces and voices to people in the past. For example, Mark Edmonds (1999) wrote imaginative vignettes of life in Neolithic Britain, while Ruth Tringham (1991) evoked the drama and emotion surrounding the death of people and the burning of houses in Neolithic south-east Europe. These attempts to ‘people the past’ were, at the time, complemented by multi-vocal narratives that sought to give voice to different contemporary interpreters of the past, such as Barbara Bender’s collaborative work on Stonehenge and Leskernick (Bender 1998; Bender et al. 1997). These bodies of work encourage us to think critically about the process ofwriting the past and the ‘will to truth’ in our stories. We are also invited to ask who is writing, whose voices are heard, what types of language are being used, and to what effect. These genres also question the type of past that we wish to write. Narratives may be variously based on power and politics (Parker Pearson and Richards 1999), emotion and bereavement (Tarlow 1999, 2000, 2012), action and performance (Pearson and Shanks 1991; Shanks 2012), material culture and identity (Thomas 1996).
On dealing with the past, transitional justice and archives