In this article I focus on the emotional, sensory and aesthetic affordances of urban archaeological remains conserved in situ and explore what these ruins ‘do’ in the context of the layered urban fabric of the city. I am concerned with a particular category of archaeological remains: those that illustrate the colonial history of settler nations, exploring examples in Sydney and Montreal. Using Sara Ahmed’s concept of ‘affective economies’ – where emotions work to stick things together and align individuals with communities – I tease out some of the distinctive aspects of this particular form of social/emotional/material entanglement, that appears to create stable objects of memory and identity from a much more contingent and complex matrix of politics, social structures, and the more-than-human materiality of the city. I argue that an understanding of the affective qualities of ruins and archaeological traces, and of how people feel heritage and the past through aesthetic and sensuous experiences of materiality, authenticity, locality and identity, bring us closer to understanding how heritage works.

中文翻译：

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近距离接触和个人接触：感受城市考古遗址的过去

在本文中，我将重点放在就地保存的城市考古遗迹的情感，感官和美学承受能力上，并探讨在城市分层城市结构的背景下这些遗址的作用。我关心的是一类特殊的考古遗迹：那些用来说明定居者国家的殖民历史，在悉尼和蒙特利尔探索实例的遗迹。我使用萨拉·艾哈迈德（Sara Ahmed）的“情感经济”概念-情感将各种事物粘合在一起并使个体与社区保持联系-我挑逗了这种特定形式的社会/情感/物质纠缠形式的一些独特方面，这些方面似乎创造了稳定的对象政治，社会结构以及比人类更为重要的物质性等偶然性和复杂性矩阵所产生的记忆和身份认同。