The poems in How to Live in Ruins tell one couple's story of moving to Cleveland and raising a family there. This is a book for anyone who has ever loved a place that's a little bit rusty and tried to make it better.

The author of The Dead Beat and This Book is Overdue! turns her piercing eye and charming wit to the real-life avatars of Indiana Jones—the archaeologists who sort through the muck and mire of swamps, ancient landfills, volcanic islands, and other dirty places to reclaim history for us all. Pompeii, Machu Picchu, the Valley of the Kings, the Parthenon—the names of these legendary archaeological sites conjure up romance and mystery. The news is full of archaeology: treasures found (British king under parking lot) and treasures lost (looters, bulldozers, natural disaster, and war). Archaeological research tantalizes us with possibilities (are modern humans really part Neandertal?). Where are the archaeologists behind these stories? What kind of work do they actually do, and why does it matter? Marilyn Johnson’s Lives in Ruins is an absorbing and entertaining look at the lives of contemporary archaeologists as they sweat under the sun for clues to the puzzle of our past. Johnson digs and drinks alongside archaeologists, chases them through the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and even Machu Picchu, and excavates their lives. Her subjects share stories we rarely read in history books, about slaves and Ice Age hunters, ordinary soldiers of the American Revolution, children of the first century, Chinese woman warriors, sunken fleets, mummies. What drives these archaeologists is not the money (meager) or the jobs (scarce) or the working conditions (dangerous), but their passion for the stories that would otherwise be buried and lost.

Part memoir, part potted history of civilisation, My Life in Ruins is the account of a life lived in uncovering the past. Adam Ford is an archaeologist. Not only has he been on expeditions to unlock the mysteries of the past in the Caribbean, British Isles, Jordan, Syria, Israel, United Arab Emirates and Australia, he's also had heat stroke, hypothermia, and dysentery; been chased by camel spiders; walked on by scorpions and pestered by bugs big enough to ride. In more than 20 years roaming the globe, he's lived in some of the most remote locations in the world and suffered the back-breaking and soul-destroying monotony of shifting tonnes of dirt with a shovel. From Cold War bunkers in England to Bronze Age cities on the Euphrates, remotes caves in the Jordan Valley, shipwrecks in Western Australia and burials in Barbados, Adam has dug, dived, abseiled and trekked his way into history. Part memoir, part potted history of civilisation, MY LIFE IN RUINS is the story of a life lived in uncovering the past.

Ruins and remnants of the past are endowed with life, rather than mere relics handed down from previous generations. Living Ruins explores some of the ways Indigenous people relate to the material remains of human activity and provides an informed and critical stance that nuances and contests institutionalized patrimonialization discourse on vestiges of the past in present landscapes. Ten case studies from the Maya region, Amazonia, and the Andes detail and contextualize narratives, rituals, and a range of practices and attitudes toward different kinds of vestiges. The chapters engage with recently debated issues such as regimes of historicity and knowledge, cultural landscapes, conceptions of personhood and ancestrality, artifacts, and materiality. They focus on Indigenous perspectives rather than mainstream narratives such as those mediated by UNESCO, Hollywood, travel agents, and sometimes even academics. The contributions provide critical analyses alongside a multifaceted account of how people relate to the place/time nexus, expanding our understanding of different ontological conceptualizations of the past and their significance in the present. Living Ruins adds to the lively body of work on the invention of tradition, Indigenous claims on their lands and history, “retrospective ethnogenesis,” and neo-Indianism in a world where tourism, NGOs, and Western essentialism are changing Indigenous attitudes and representations. This book is significant to anyone interested in cultural heritage studies, Amerindian spirituality, and Indigenous engagement with archaeological sites in Latin America. Contributors: Cedric Becquey, Laurence Charlier Zeineddine, Marie Chosson, Pablo Cruz, Philippe Erikson, Antoinette Molinié, Fernando Santos-Granero, Emilie Stoll, Valentina Vapnarsky, Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen

Using monuments and ruins by way of illustration, this fascinating book examines the symbolic, ideological, geographical and aesthetic importance of Greek classical iconography for the Western world. It examines how classical Greek monuments are simultaneously perceived as sublime national symbols and as a mythological and archetypal reference against which Western modernism is measured. The book investigates the dialogue this double identity leads to, as well as frequent clashes between ancient (but also later) monuments and their modern urban or regional environment. Living Ruins, Value Conflicts examines the complex historical process of monument restoration and enhancement, and analyses the nexus of changing perceptions, aesthetic visions and formal principles over the past two centuries. The book shows the ways in which archaeology and monumentality affect modern life, the modern aesthetic, our notions of nationhood, of place, of self - and the limits to and possibilities for national development imposed by the need to ensure ruins are kept 'alive'.

"In 'The Ruins Lesson,' the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning poet-critic Susan Stewart explores the West's fascination with ruins in literature, visual art, and architecture, covering a vast chronological and geographical range from the ancient Egyptians to T. S. Eliot. In the multiplication of images of ruins, artists, and writers she surveys, Stewart shows how these thinkers struggled to recover lessons out of the fragility or our cultural remains. She tries to understand the appeal in the West of ruins and ruination, particularly Roman ruins, in the work and thought of Goethe, Piranesi, Blake, and Wordsworth, whom she returns to throughout the book. Her sweeping, deeply felt study encompasses the founding legends of broken covenants and original sin; Christian transformations of the classical past; the myths and rituals of human fertility; images of ruins in Renaissance allegory, eighteenth-century melancholy, and nineteenth-century cataloguing; and new gardens that eventually emerged from ancient sites of disaster"--

This book constructs a theory of ruins that celebrates their vitality and unity in aesthetic experience. Its argument draws upon over 100 illustrations prepared in 40 countries. Ruins flourish as matter, form, function, incongruity, site, and symbol. Ruin underlies cultural values in cinema, literature and philosophy. Finally, ruin guides meditations upon our mortality and endangered world.