Resilience and the afterlives of events : archaeological theory for heritage practice

Mlekuž, Dimitrij (author)

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.

• Language: English
• Keywords: resilience, assemblage theory, event, archaeology, heritage practice, materiality, transformation, collapse
• Work type: Article
• Typology: 1.01 - Original Scientific Article
• Organization: FF - Faculty of Arts
• Publication status: Published
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Publication date: 01.01.2026
• Year: 2026
• Number of pages: 16 str.
• Numbering: Vol. 9, iss. 3
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-179889
• UDC: 902.3
• ISSN on article: 2571-9408
• DOI: 10.3390/heritage9030090
• COBISS.SI-ID: 269747203
• Publication date in RUL: 26.02.2026

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: Heritage
• Shortened title: Heritage
• Publisher: MDPI AG
• ISSN: 2571-9408
• COBISS.SI-ID: 1538164675

Licences

• License: CC BY-NC 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
• Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
• Description: A creative commons license that bans commercial use, but the users don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

Secondary language

• Language: Slovenian
• Keywords: odpornost, teorija sestavov, dogodek, arheologija, assemblage teorija, materialnost, preobrazba, kolaps

Projects

• Funder: ARIS - Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency
• Project number: P6-0247
• Name: Arheologija

• Funder: Other - Other funder or multiple funders
• Funding programme: Univerza v Ljubljani
• Project number: SN-ZRD/22-27/0510
• Name: Materialna odpornost v časih okoljskih in družbenih sprememb
• Acronym: MATRES