Introduzione

In the spring of 2020, Italy was among the first countries to experience home confinement as a public health measure to contain the Covid-19 epidemic. This measure significantly impacted women’s lives and their relationships with space and daily materiality. This contribution recounts the experience of a participatory archaeological observation project conducted during those weeks of collective ‘anthropause,’ exploring the relationship with a community, both virtual and real, united by the shared experience of home isolation and gender identity. The article describes the context, methods, and data collected through an unprecedented experiment in reading contemporary domestic materiality conducted remotely, without the possibility of direct physical contact with the investigation’s traces, objects, and subjects. The case study presents the work on the extensive data collected between March and July 2020, involving a focus group of Italian women, diverse in age, geographical origin, and profession. In particular, the article outlines the methodological solutions implemented to ontologically manage the large amount of collected data, including creating a dedicated ontology and mapping with existing thesauri. It also provides some interpretative examples of the main elements analysed and the relationships between intimate information and material aspects. Within this context, the article concludes with reflections on the broader methodological theme of conducting archaeology of the present, ranging from considerations related to the abundance of traces and constant immersion in them to the transformation of space and objects in their material and symbolic definition to the determination and impact of temporal references during short and medium-term spans in the interpretative phase.