Resilience and the Afterlives of Events: Archaeological Theory for Heritage Practice

Resilience is frequently mobilized in heritage discourse as a systemic capacity for stability and recovery. This article critically interrogates resilience as a managerial rationality imported into archaeological and heritage practice, often without sufficient attention to its epistemological and political implications. Drawing on assemblage theory and the concept of the event, it reframes resilience archaeologically as a material effect of relations among people, things, practices, and landscapes. Rather than evaluating the persistence of bounded entities, resilience is approached through material reconfigurations, ruptures, and continuities that leave durable traces in the archaeological record. This perspective clarifies how processes commonly described as collapse, reorganization, or emergence become archaeologically legible, and why not all disturbances constitute events. The article then examines heritage as the afterlife of events, conceptualized as an assemblage that stabilizes rupture through practices of conservation, commemoration, and care. Heritage endurance is neither automatic nor neutral, but contingent on ongoing work and embedded in relations of power. The article concludes by reflecting on the ethical and political limits of resilience in contexts of crisis and inequality, arguing for a reflexive, assemblage-based understanding of heritage focused on processes of reorganization rather than managerial equilibrium.