Materialities, Moving Images and the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games

This paper discusses the circulation of archaeological heritage through moving image practices associated with the Olympic Games. From the Athens Games of 1896 to the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games, Olympic ‘mega-events’ (Roche 2000, 2003) continue to produce media narratives of place grounded in archaeological practices. I discuss the performativity of varied and distributed
screen practices that extend and modify the archaeological agency of material culture in conditioning the production of place, space and past-ness. While public discourse may have downplayed the role of the city’s heritage in the production of the Olympics, I suggest that archaeology is never far away from Olympic narrative frames.