Jonathan W. GardnerThe University of Edinburgh | UoE · School of History, Classics and Archaeology
Jonathan W. Gardner
PhD
Chancellor's Fellow
School of History, Classics & Archaeology, University of Edinburgh
jonathan.gardner@ed.ac.uk
About
31
Publications
4,887
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Introduction
My work examines the traces of large-scale landscape change, most recently considering the creation of artificial terrain through landfilling and dumping and how this becomes a form of heritage and creative practice.
I also research the role of archaeology and heritage in international mega events (e.g. the Great Exhibition of 1851 and 2012 Olympics).
Other research considers the archaeology sector as an 'industry' (with its own material culture) and the ethics of commercial/CRM archaeology.
Additional affiliations
September 2014 - present
The Groundbreakers (community heritage project)
Position
- Consultant
Description
- -Developing activities and workshops for an HLF-funded community heritage program at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park (based on my PhD research). -Providing archaeological advice to project coordinators on the history and archaeology of the Olympic Park
August 2017 - December 2019
Position
- Fellow
Description
- https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/people/academic/jonathan-gardner
September 2012 - July 2016
Position
- PhD Student
Description
- Thesis: 'The archaeology and heritage of mega events in London, 1851-2012'.
Education
September 2010 - September 2011
September 2004 - June 2007
Publications
Publications (31)
In this paper I investigate the archaeology industry, the commercially driven sector of our discipline that excavates and surveys sites in advance of development as a part of the wider industrialized world. Through examination of the multiple elements of commercial archaeology (Cultural Resource Management-CRM) operations, using the UK heritage man...
A Contemporary Archaeology of London’s Mega Events explores the traces of London’s most significant modern ‘mega events’. Though only open for a few weeks or months, mega events permanently and disruptively reshape their host cities and societies: they demolish and rebuild whole districts, they draw in materials and participants from around the glo...
This chapter explores the changing human valuations of oil shale waste – blaes – in the district of West Lothian, Scotland. Around 150 million cubic metres of this material remain here in vast heaps known as bings, the remnants of a short-lived but globally significant oil industry, active between 1851 and 1962. In following the changing perception...
Vast quantities of waste rubble produced through demolition, natural disasters and conflict form part of the globe-spanning, anthropogenic deposit that has been called the “archaeosphere”. Whilst such material is often considered “waste” and of little value in the immediate aftermath of deconstruction or destruction, rubble rarely remains “wasted”...
Waste creates and reshapes our contemporary landscapes in many different ways. Often, such landscapes are regarded negatively as places to avoid if possible: garbage dumps, sewage infrastructure, mine heaps or, at smaller scales, rubbish-strewn streets or plastic-choked waterways. That said, given the variety of materials that make up different was...
In this article, I undertake an archaeology of urban “wastelands.” In doing so I ask how such places are materially and conceptually “made” and examine the effects that such labeling has on how postindustrial urban sites are used and valued. Taking examples from the capital cities of England and Scotland (London and Edinburgh), I show that the mean...
This photo essay describes how a COVID-19 lockdown led to the creative investigation of an unlikely archaeological site: Royston Beach on the shoreline of north Edinburgh (Scotland).
Much of the Beach and the land behind it was reclaimed from the tidal estuary of the Firth of Forth between the 1950s and 1990s using vast quantities of demolition ru...
* The peer reviewed version of this will be published in Journal of Historical Archaeology in early 2024*
In this paper, I undertake an archaeology of urban 'wastelands'. In doing so I ask how such places are materially and conceptually 'made' and examine the effects that such labelling has on how post-industrial urban sites are used and valued....
In this paper I explore changing valuations of oil shale waste – blaes – in West Lothian, Scotland. Around 150 million cubic metres of blaes remain here in vast heaps - bings - the remnants of a short-lived but globally significant oil industry, active between 1851 and 1962.
While these heaps are relatively nontoxic, they are material witnesses t...
https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/jca-book-reviews-archaeology-burning-man-rise-fall-black-rock-city-carolyn-l-white/
This chapter explores how the development of UCL East and the other emerging cultural institutions of Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park (Stratford, London) have been shaped by the area’s historical development and the mega event that precipitated their emergence – the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. It locates this inquiry within a longer-term...
This paper examines how (post)industrial spaces become labelled as ‘disused’, ‘wastelands’, or ‘brownfields’ in processes of urban redevelopment. Taking a broad overview of different examples across sites in Edinburgh and London (UK) I ask how understandings of waste and value are produced and contested through industrial processes themselves (the...
Read here: https://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2020_09.pdf
[presentation video]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FZy46oFclk
A summary of the idea that commercial archaeology is itself an industrial process.
This paper considers interlinked processes of waste production and management as an example of heritage creation and maintenance. Building upon recent studies of processes of decay and waste heritage management (e.g. DeSilvey 2017, Buser 2016), through examination of several former industrial sites in East London, I explore how waste can be seen as...
Whole book free from: https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/118162
This chapter considers how mega events like the London 2012 Olympic Games develop a complex relationship with the past of their host sites.
In particular it examines how the London 2012's main Stratford (east London) location was reconceptualised as both 'wasteland' and heritage....
First published in Archaeology International 22(1): Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
'Investigating several modern ‘mega events’, including World’s Fairs and Olympic Games, this paper discusses the complex relationship such events and their sites have often had with ‘the future’. Such events are frequently associated with demonstrating pr...
‘Mega events’, temporary large-scale cultural spectacles of the modern era (such as the Great Exhibitions, World’s Fairs and sporting events like the Olympic Games), have often been presented by their organisers, commentators and subsequent historiography as unified, progressive and unproblematic urban interventions which yield only benefits for th...
Investigating several modern 'mega events', including World's Fairs and Olympic Games, this paper discusses the complex relationship such events and their sites have often had with 'the future'. Such events are frequently associated with demonstrating progress towards future 'utopias' (for example 'The World of Tomorrow' theme of the 1939 World's F...
In this paper I investigate the archaeology industry, the commercially-driven sector of our discipline that excavates and surveys sites in advance of development, as a part of the wider industrialised world. Through examination of the multiple elements of commercial/CRM operations using the UK heritage management context as a case study, I examine...
This paper considers how the creation, collection, transformation, movement and reuse of building rubble
fundamentally reshapes urban landscapes. Creation of rubble is often rapid, created through conflict, disaster, or demolition, but its usefulness to urban development as foundations, in land reclamation, or recycling can encompass longer timesca...
Discussion of the ethics of commercial archaeology practice are currently rarely discussed in northern Europe, despite the field having seen critique in places like Canada, Spain and Latin and South America (Hutchings and LaSalle 2015; papers in Resco 2016). This stands in contrast to ethical critique building within public archaeology and conflict...
What role can the material-traces of the past play in situations of rapidly changing urban development? Mega-projects in London, such as the transformation of the docklands and the Olympics in Stratford, are often framed as unproblematic ‘regeneration’ of former industrial areas, and hence, often ignore the complex and complicated heritages linked...
This paper considers the archaeological traces of some of the largest temporary gatherings imaginable: modern cultural mega events such as World's Fairs, Expositions and Olympic Games. Focusing specifically on what is widely accepted as the ‘first’ such event, The Great Exhibition of 1851, its aftermath and the rebuilding of its host structure, the...
This thesis examines the development of mega events in the the modern era, such as International Expos, World Fairs, and Olympic Games, and their relationship to archaeology and heritage through comparing three significant examples from London’s recent history: The Great Exhibition of 1851; the 1951 Festival of Britain’s South Bank Exhibition; and...
[Author's pre-print version] In this paper I explore the concept of the 'lost river' and the implications this term has for our understanding of the history of changing urban environments. In taking a voyage down one of the London 2012 Olympic Park’s now-filled waterways, the Pudding Mill River, charting it and its surrounding area’s diverse histor...
The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World. Edited by Graves-Brown Paul,Harrison Rodney and Piccini Angela. 246mm. Pp 864, 140 ills and 3 photo essays. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013. isbn9780199602001. £125 (hbk); £107.30 (ebook). - Volume 95 - Jonathan Gardner
Investigating several phases of construction and security fencing erected during for the London 2012 Olympics from 2007 to 2013 I show that the act of enclosure has multiple, contested histories that betray varied human desires beyond mere protection of property. Taking a contemporary archaeological and materials-based approach, I demonstrate how t...
Considering the successive iterations of the fence surrounding the London 2012 Olympic site in Stratford, east London, I demonstrate that during the five periods of enclosure considered, these boundaries have highlighted the London Games’ contested past, present, and future. An examination of the material and discursive constructions of each of the...
Using the example of the Isle of Dogs, London, I seek to investigate the contested use of the past in the present. I consider the various discourses of ‘history’ and ‘heritage’ and radically interrogate the normative present formed by these methods of re-presentation utilising an archaeology of the ‘contemporary past’. With this methodology I demon...
Questions
Question (1)
I am trying to think about waste material as a kind of 'evidence' for something that happened elsewhere. More generally I wonder what is out there on the idea that one maaterial or whoe landscape can say something about some other techno-social process or function, distant spatially and/or temporally based on one substance or site. E.g. margarine cartons as proxies for the mass killing of cetaceans; coal slag heaps as proxies for warm homes, electricity, climate change. I.e thinking about chains of production and consumption and discard/disposal and reuse.
Perhaps by-product is a better word? Also linked to idea of affordance and maybe even Schiffer and c/n-transforms but not really seeing this here in terms of 'the archaeological record' as such.
Anyhow, any thoughts welcome!
