Twenty years ago Mike Pearson, performance artist, and Michael Shanks, archaeologist, opened a dialogue and collaboration through the theatre company "Brith Gof", of which Mike was founding artistic director.



Their common interests: forms of (re)collection—the gatherings of memory practices; and site and locale—multi-temporal articulations, where different events and times endure and come together in the material forms of inhabited places, in the traces and remains of the past in the present.



This is a special extended edition of the review of their work that appears in the book "Art and Archaeology", edited by Andrew Cochrane and Ian Russell (Springer 2013).



Pearson|Shanks define their theatre/archaeology as the rearticulation of fragments of the past as real-time event. They offer new ways of engaging landscape and cityscape, of scripting and documenting encounter, new insights into the activation of memory and remains of the past in the performance of everyday life.