Making journeys: archaeologies of mobility

Abstract

anxieties in hyper-real, dystopian Tokyo and in the fantasyland created in the subconscious of the novel’s protagonist. The final section, ‘Urban Spectrality’, presents haunted urban topographies which raise questions and disturb assumptions about modernity. David Waldron and Sharn Waldron explore the supernatural history of the nineteenth-century Ballarat goldfields of central Victoria, disinterring an unsettling past. This fits in with other excellent work interrogating the ‘spectral accretions’ (Waterton and Saul 2020) of colonial Australia and the violence, poverty and oppression that lie at the foundations of colonising, capitalising – otherwise ‘modernising’ – campaigns. Hauntings also reflect a problematic past in Mexico City, and as María del Pilar Blanco shows, the presence–absence of Emperor Maximilian I could be traced through a photograph of his corpse. Alevtina Solovyova examines how the reproduction and adaptation of traditional ghostlore and demonology in contemporary Beijing can reveal personal and collective anxieties and tensions. The volume concludes with Morag Rose on post-industrial Manchester, whose spectral waterways reconcile people to the rupture of the modern city from its industrial past. As with almost all edited volumes, quality is mixed; the papers by Pooley and Solovyova are excellent, while others will be of value to anyone interested in the supernatural and especially its presence in urban modernity. Despite the lack of direct contribution from archaeologists, Supernatural Cities will also be of interest to them, and can broaden approaches to urban and industrial archaeology. This welcome contribution to studies of the supernatural and the urban has something for everyone.