Haunted Futures and Alien Archaeologies

Just before Christmas I attended the annual Theoretical Archaeology Group conference in Chester. To be honest, I mostly steered clear of the hardcore theory – while I do quite like it, I liked it on my own terms and when my brain is feeling fresh and focused: the week before Christmas, at the end of a long and tiring year, not so much. But there was a lot else going on at the conference and I attended several inspiring panels about outreach, engagement and how archaeology relates to other fields. I’ve written about the conference in general over on the CREWS blog, but here I wanted to go into a little detail about my own paper, which was firmly in this blog’s thematic ambit since it was about the archaeology of alien megastructures in fiction.