Archaeology and the Interpretation of the Past in Cormac McCarthy’s Novels

ABSTRACT Many scholars have noted that ruins, trash, and other material traces of the human past pervade the novels of Cormac McCarthy. This article argues that such motifs emerge from his interest in the discipline of field archaeology. The article authors trace three characteristics of archaeology—artifacts, field research, and temporal sequence—through McCarthy’s works and suggest that the discipline shapes how he represents the past. Archaeology provides McCarthy with a model for amplifying the marginal subjects that textual histories elide, articulating material and embodied encounters with the past and evoking the processes of interpretation that such encounters necessitate. Beyond simply depicting archaeology, however, McCarthy also offers a metacommentary on the epistemes that shape archaeological interpretation. Through such metacommentary, he foregrounds the contingent nature of archaeological practice and thus of historical knowledge more broadly. Expanding the scholarly understanding of McCarthy’s interdisciplinarity, this article demonstrates that archaeology represents an overlooked feature of his well-documented passion for empirical inquiry. Archaeology informs how McCarthy represents human history and the formation of knowledge.