Tools for Speculative Archaeology (2023–present) takes archaeology as a speculative tangent to an ongoing line of inquiry into underworld infrastructures and the agency of corpse–ghosts. Rather than treating archaeology as an empirical practice of recovery, the research approaches it as a ritual negotiation across realms—where burial, excavation, restitution, and haunting continually fold into one another.

The methodology of the fictional “speculative archaeologist” emerges through recurring motifs and operations that circulate across works. The economy of offering—exemplified by the burning of ghost money—models material exchange with the underworld. Spatial measurements—site plans and excavation grids—are re-enacted from the tomb owner’s perspective. Linguistic slippages—between Míngqì (明器, spirit-articles) and Míngqì (冥契, contracts with the underworld)—recast burial goods as tokens of transaction between the realms of the living and the dead. 

As an ongoing research project, Tools for Speculative Archaeology collects these recurring symbols as provisional “tools”—implements that remain in flux, awaiting to be refined, recombined, and reimagined in future case studies that continue to probe the connections between archaeology, underworld infrastructures, and ghostly agency.