. . . have been reading from archival material re: performances . . . this note struck me as pertinent . . .

"The traces left behind by performance are perhaps more susceptible to the approaches of contemporary archaeology than methods taken from textual analysis: the documentation of unwritten happening, attested through material trace, is an archaeological project. For certain, performance is inevitably in the past and ultimately enigmatic. It was thus around questions of documenting performance that I was drawn back to archaeology, a discipline intimately concerned with retrieval, recording and reassembling."(Mike Pearson & Michael Shanks. Theatre/Archaeology.)