James Symonds

University of Amsterdam | UVA · Amsterdam Centre for Ancient Studies and Archaeology

On the 24th of February 2022, Vladimir Putin addressed the Russian Federation in a televised speech announcing a 'special military operation' against Ukraine. Putin castigated the West as an 'Empire of Lies' and drew upon Russian history and cultural heritage to justify his invasion of Eastern Ukraine. This article investigates how cultural memory...

Synopsis: This call for chapters invites interested researchers to send their abstracts of suggested chapters on the archaeologies of displacement, migration and humanitarian crises, their impact on societies, cultural identity, and collective memory of displaced people around the world.

The war in Syria, and the rise of non-state radical actors placed a spotlight on the scale and intensity of destruction of cultural heritage sites in Syria. The Ancient City of Aleppo, a World Heritage Site was particularly hard hit by the conflict and when the city was re-unified in late 2016, several national and international organisations start...

O artigo apresenta os resultados obtidos até o momento sobre pesquisa arqueológica de longo curso sobre a Guerra do Contestado (1912-1916), que ocorreu no meio oeste do Estado de Santa Catarina e opôs a população sertaneja da região contra as forças militares federais e estaduais. Até esta ocasião, foram registradas dezenas de sítios associados ao...

O artigo apresenta os resultados obtidos até o momento sobre pesquisa arqueológica de longo curso sobre a Guerra do Contestado (1912-1916), que ocorreu no meio oeste do Estado de Santa Catarina e opôs a população sertaneja da região contra as forças militares federais e estaduais. Até esta ocasião, foram registradas dezenas de sítios associados ao...

The Iron Curtain served as a physical barrier that divided Europe and separated people living in Soviet-controlled countries from the West. In this chapter, we examine the impact of the Iron Curtain on the district of Tachov, in the former Czechoslovakia. Using the evidence of archaeological survey and excavation, we identify three chronological ph...

"This volume offers detailed case studies that apply the approach of contemporary archaeology to investigate and expose ways in which the repressive actions and policies of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes affect peoples’ everyday lives, bodies, mobilities, memory-making, and heritage construction. The volume is wide in its scope; it is a tim...

Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Archaeologica

This article examines the role of archaeology in contemporary society. It works from the premise that archaeology is a form of socio-political action and explores some of the ways in which archaeologies of the recent past can have therapeutic or cathartic effects. Three case studies are presented. The first two focus on the recovery of war dead and...

ICOMOS University Forum organized by the UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures at Linnaeus University, Kalmar, Sweden and the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture, in collaboration with ICOMOS International, ICOMOS Netherlands, and City of Amsterdam, held at Amsterdam, Netherlands, 11-14 June 2019

This guidance is intended to aid archaeologists working on sites of historic industries. For the purpose of this guidance ‘industries’ are non-domestic manufacturing activities (but not the production of foodstuffs) and ‘historic’ covers the period from the early 17th century to the late 19th century. The advice demonstrates the additional informat...

This project focuses on the evidence for material life, ethnicity, and diet in the district of Vlooienburg, Amsterdam (AD 1600-1800). It is motivated by a desire to develop an integrated archaeological methodology that enables personal possessions, tableware and food waste recovered from cesspit deposits to be linked to historically-documented hous...

Recent theoretical debates have identified time as a key area for research by historical archaeologists. In this paper we present evidence from Tornio, in northern Finland, and suggest that the early-17th-century colonists who founded this town developed a multidimensional conception of time that varied according to context and allowed deeply held...

The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology provides an overview of the international field of historical archaeology (c. AD 1500 to the present) through seventeen specially-commissioned essays from leading researchers in the field. The volume explores key themes in historical archaeology including documentary archaeology, the writing of hist...

In this paper we examine a prominent but little studied aspect of everyday life in Central Europe, the Czech tramping movement. We aim to show how workers and students from Czech industrial towns and cities created and sustained imaginary rural spaces and flamboyant alternative personas. In some cases these shared fantasy worlds were understood to...

This article discusses street mirrors or 'gossip mirrors', in terms of urban social relations and surveillance. Street mirrors were introduced to coastal towns in Sweden and Finland in the 18th and early 19th centuries and may still be found in well-preserved towns with historic wooden centres. The authors argue that the introduction of monitoring...

In 1822, a devastating town fire sealed a large ceramic assemblage from a store in the town of Oulu in northern Finland. Excavations of the merchant’s stock recovered over a hundred kilograms of ceramics that was almost entirely composed of undecorated creamware, a ware and decorative type whose popularity had faded significantly by the 1820’s. The...

Some 220,000 German soldiers were stationed and fought in northern Finland during World War II. These troops required huge amounts of supplies that were provided by supply encampments in several locations, including the towns of Oulu and Tornio. In this paper the authors consider how the memory of these German-built sites has shaped post-war urban...

This end chapter reviews the contributions to the volume. The historical archaeology of Danish and Swedish colonialism is examined in relation to wider debates about the archaeology of colonialism and recent trends in postcolonial studies.

While contextual and interpretive approaches to money have recently emerged in archaeology, coins have attracted little serious attention in the post-medieval archaeology of the western world. The relative neglect of coins as archaeological finds probably derives from an (implicit) assumption that the function and meaning of coins is readily appare...

When founded in 1621, Tornio was the northernmost town in Europe. The founding of Tornio was part of a larger urbanization boom in the Kingdom of Sweden which established itself as a northern European great power in the early 17th century. This paper discusses the meanings of, and the townsfolk's relationship with the urban landscape of Tornio in t...

Poverty is often thought of as an inevitable social condition, and the blame for any shortcomings in governmental welfare policies is frequently placed upon the failings of individuals, markets, and demography. By exploring the influence of neoliberal politics on archaeologies of slum-life this article makes the case that less emphasis should be pl...

The Construction Manager was in an uncompromising mood. “I suppose your lot enjoy all that scratching about in the dirt,” he quipped. “But as far as I’m concerned, if I want to find out about the Victorians I can just look in a history book.” With a piling rig booked to arrive in 10 days time, and a tight schedule to keep to, I could understand his...

In 1851, the landlord of the Hebridean islands of South Uist and Barra evicted almost 3,000 people from their homes and transported them by means of assisted passage to Canada. This episode of clearance was prompted by a failure of the potato crop and a four-year-long famine, and exposed the dire state of poverty in which the inhabitants of the isl...

Sheffield, in the north of England, grew rapidly in the 19th century and gained an international reputation for its cutlery, tableware, and steel products. The material legacy of this age of industrialisation is extensive, and archaeological work in the modern city over the last 20 years has, for the most part, focused on the above and below ground...

Although historical archaeologists often explore similar themes, the intellectual traditions in the United States and the United Kingdom lead to differing interpretations of these themes. The contributions to this innovative volume provide a bridge between a US-based archaeologist and a UK-based archaeologist on the themes of landscape studies, urb...

British Industrialisation was accompanied by a huge increase in population and the rapid and unplanned expansion of many towns and cities. New types of workplace and new forms of domestic settlement were created to facilitate the growth of manufacturing activity and new types of housing were built to accommodate workers and their families as the 19...

This paper examines the ways in which international historical archaeologists have explored the recent past, in an effort to inform and contribute to contemporary debates about social identity and social inclusion. It is argued that the archaeology of the mundane and everyday can contribute to contemporary culture by creating a sense of community a...

The multi-period landscape archaeology of the Isle of South Uist in the Western Isles based on research in by university teams from Sheffield, Cardiff, and Bournemouth

Research into the profound economic and social changes which transformed the Western Isles over the last two hundred years, leading to mass depopulation and emigration, has been left almost exclusively to documentary historians and historical geographers. The remoteness of the islands from modern-day centres of population has undoubtedly deterred s...

Following the 1745 rebellion, agrarian capitalism rapidly transformed subsistence practices in the Outer Hebrides. Landowners increased rents, enclosed common lands, and replaced crofters and cattle with sheep-ranges. Population growth, the demise of the kelp industry, and crop failures compounded the problems of the peasantry. Widespread emigratio...