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Contemporary Archaeology and the City: Creativity, Ruination, and Political Action
Abstract
Contemporary Archaeology and the City foregrounds the archaeological study of post-industrial and other urban transformations through a diverse, international collection of case studies. Over the past decade contemporary archaeology has emerged as a dynamic force for dissecting and contextualizing the material complexities of present-day societies. Contemporary archaeology challenges conventional anthropological and archaeological conceptions of the past by pushing temporal boundaries closer to, if not into, the present. The volume is organized around three themes that highlight the multifaceted character of urban transitions in present-day cities - creativity, ruination, and political action. The case studies offer comparative perspectives on transformative global urban processes in local contexts through research conducted in the struggling, post-industrial cities of Detroit, Belfast, Indianapolis, Berlin, Liverpool, Belem, and post-Apartheid Cape Town, as well as the thriving urban centres of Melbourne, New York City, London, Chicago, and Istanbul. Together, the volume contributions demonstrate how the contemporary city is an urban palimpsest comprised by archaeological assemblages - of the built environment, the surface, and buried sub-surface - that are traces of the various pasts entangled with one another in the present. This volume aims to position the city as one of the most important and dynamic arenas for archaeological studies of the contemporary by presenting a range of theoretically-engaged case studies that highlight some of the major issues that the study of contemporary cities pose for archaeologists.
... The edgeland landscape has been neglected in the study of the modern and contemporary city, and it has largely been through the work of writers, naturists and poets, and the growing field of Contemporary Archaeology that it has come to recognition. This body of research has recognised the marginalised nature of many of the processes and communities which exist within the edgeland and has attempted to explore such marginalised and liminal spaces as landfill sites, motorway systems and industrial estates, refugee camps and spaces of youth culture through an archaeological approach (Buchli and Lucas, 2001;McAtackney and Ryzewski, 2017;González-Ruibal, 2018;Shanks, 2013). This research aims to build upon this existing tradition and produce a comprehensive biography of an edgeland landscape, charting the processes by which the edgeland is created, and those by which an edgeland is once again consumed by the city. ...
... From Rathje and Murphy's (1992) 'Rubbish! The archaeology of garbage' the study of a number of those key processes and features of the edgeland landscape became a key focus in the study of the contemporary past -waste, urban decline, ruination, production, and marginalised communities (Shanks, Platt and Rathje, 2004;McAtackney and Ryzewski, 2017;Graves-Brown, 2015;Graves-Brown and Kiddey, 2015). In particular the aim of this type of archaeology of the present, has been to produce studies of the contemporary world grounded in the "material realities" rather than from "self-conscious self-reports" allowing criticisms of society based upon those irrefutable realities (Rathje, 1996;Rathje, 1981;Shanks and Tilley, 1987;Buchli and Lucas, 2001, pp.5-7). ...
... Shanks (et al. 2004, p.69) edgeland is the physical manifestation of the sanitising of the city where processes and functions considered too dirty or ugly to be allowed to exist in plain sight within the modern idealised city are hidden and collectively forgotten (Shanks et al. 2004). Landuses associated with the edgeland today in official and unofficial forms are the storage, processing and removal of waste such as sewage works, landfills, scrapyards and fly tipping sites, the disposal of the dead in crematoriums and cemeteries, the infrastructure of travel such as railway sidings, motorways, garages and showrooms, the yards and sheds of modern light industries and the ruinous forms of previous landuses overgrown and neglected (Shoard, 2002;Rathje and Murphy, 1992;McAtackney and Ryzewski, 2017). The edgeland is born when land within or around the city is made available, usually land that is subprime for development and thus does not initially attract the avaricious gaze of the property or commercial developer. ...
The study of urbanism has been dogged by the legacies of the enlightenment era fixation on an idealised classical world during the birth of such disciplines as city planning resulted in the construction of idealised forms of the city based of sanitised visions of the classical city. Through the ideologies and actions of politicians, planners and bureaucrats, the representation of the idealised city has resulted in the production of spaces of real urbanism, hidden within and around the city. In these spaces those functions essential to the life of the modern city, yet considered improper in the idealised city, are hidden. These spaces, known as the edgelands, encompass everything from suburban landfill sites and municipal waste treatment landscapes, to abandoned railway yards, derelict factory sites and wastelands within the inner city.
In this research an exploration of the urban edgeland landscape of Mount Vernon and Daldowie, in Glasgow, Scotland, is considered in the production of an archaeology of ‘real urbanism’, concerned not with the idealised city of elite archaeologies of urbanism, but instead with the grim realities of those spaces sanitised from that vision of the city yet essential to its functioning.
... One reason might be the lack of an easily applicable theory on fragments and fragmentation. The ruination of modern architecture and the decay of contemporary material culture has received theoretical interest in contemporary archaeology in recent decades (DeSilvey 2017;McAtackney and Ryzewski 2017;Pétursdóttir and Olsen 2014). In prehistoric archaeology, in contrast, the so-called fragmentation theory has been developed to engage with premodern forms of breakage and analyze wider temporal scales than modernity. ...
Despite the shift from object-to landscape-based approaches in urban heritage management, the analysis of heritage as objects is still viable, as the current archaeological theories of material culture do not see objects in the same manner as the object-based approach. To reveal the broader significance of urban archaeology for the cityscape, the relationship between the discipline and urban space is analyzed in the framework of fragmentation theory. The theory is based on prehistoric archaeology but modified to describe urban archaeology and its effects in the contemporary city. It is argued that fragments, regardless of their connection with the past and their central role in heritage work, also have autonomous potential to distract and act as agents disconnected from their original objects. The creative character of urban fragments should be explored further by archaeologists and heritage management. These ideas are scrutinized using the development of urban archaeology and heritage in the city of Turku in Finland as an example. ARTICLE HISTORY
Heritage has increasingly emerged as a pivotal medium for driving and adapting to change, and as an integral component of innovation ecosystems. In the ongoing participatory turn in governance, the management of collective heritage resources reflects a broader paradigm shift aimed at fostering sustainable socio-technical transformations. Far from being static relics of the past, heritage assets function as dynamic agents of innovation, thus influencing various dimensions of contemporary life. This research sheds light on heritage as a vibrant force for transformation and adjustment, showcasing its ability to position itself as a crucial component that both enables and guides broader processes of innovation. It emphasises how heritage sites, characterised by their transitional nature and ‘ex’ and ‘post’ identities, have become arenas for creative regeneration and socio-cultural, technical, territorial, and knowledge-based innovation. By utilising helical models and Schumpeter’s theory of creative destruction, this article underscores the transformative power of heritage to address global disruptions through heritage-driven innovations, drawing on three heritage and creative destruction categorizations. This highlights how heritage actively shapes innovative knowledge spaces while fostering urban and social regeneration, positioning it as a vital tool for rebuilding and reimagining sustainable futures. By exploring diverse local heritage transformation initiatives across different regions, this research unveils three heritage helix models that showcase the dynamic process of change management through heritage. These models offer a framework for guiding future heritage projects, fostering innovative knowledge spaces and inspiring sustainable transformations.
The city of Belfast in Northern Ireland has been made and remade through cycles of violence during its 400-year “history.” The most recent manifestation of violent conflict associated with the city was a low-level civil war euphemistically known as “the Troubles” (ca. 1968–ca. 1998). Alongside the enduring markers of bombings, civil unrest, and attempts to police and disrupt them, presences and absences can also be assigned to forced and facilitated movements of communities, the “planned violence” (O’Neill 2018) of road-building schemes, and what were designated at the time as “slum clearances.” But there have been attempts to disrupt—and reinsert—attempted erasures of conflict when associated with enduring social injustices. This article will examine a site associated with the bombing of McGurk's Bar in 1971 to reveal how the material memory of the past has been “re-presenced” to disrupt attempts to disappear sectarian violence as a form of activism in the contemporary.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic raises questions about curation, collecting,
and the ethics of documenting a traumatic event as it occurs in real
time. Such concerns became clear as the co-authors embarked on
a multi-sited study of the pandemic’s impact on four communities in
two different countries. Defining an ‘artefact’ or what is archaeological, for instance, became a complicated exercise; do chalk artworks on the sidewalk, painted rocks lining a neighbourhood trail, posters stapled on community billboards, and stuffed animals in someone’s window count as archaeological artefacts? Determining the temporal boundaries of the pandemic is also difficult; while it is fairly clear when the pandemic first began, it continues to have an impact on our post-lockdown world. Its global impact also means that the material changes and landscape alterations the co-authors witnessed were not confined or isolated to one place and one time, but rather exist in multitudes across the globe.
Historical descriptions and archaeological research provide a compelling association of the Native town of Tocobaga with the Safety Harbor site (8PI2), in Tampa Bay, Florida. The Spanish established a mission-fort at Tocobaga in 1567, but it was short-lived: responding to abuse by the colonizers, the Tocobagans killed the soldiers who had been left at the town and the Spanish burned the town in retaliation. We employ the metaphor of effacement, in its original referent to the wearing away of the surface of a coin, to describe the manner in which the colonial destruction of the town provided an opportunity for imposition of new meanings on the landscape of Tocobaga in the modern era: first as a plantation and “pleasure garden,” next as an ancient ruin and archaeological site, and later as a reform park. Archaeology is part of the effacement of the Native town—the remnants of Tocobaga were reinscribed as the type site for the Safety Harbor–period and the eponymous Mississippian-period (1010–1550) material culture complex. However, archaeology—including our recent testing—also provides a means for understanding such concepts as effacements, as well as the persistence of materiality.
Mount Holyoke, a mountain in western Massachusetts, is the site of 10 World War II casualties. This contemporary archaeological study explores the ways in which the physical remains of a 1944 plane crash on Mount Holyoke exist in the present and actively shape the lived experiences of residents and visitors. The mountain is a place rich with material and ideological manifestations of the past that intervene in the present. This article weaves together strands of evidence from ethnography and physical remains, sketching recollections and understandings of the plane crash. These multitemporal and tangled stories reveal how people in the present relate to a nonabsent past and a landscape of war on the mountain. While a commemorative memorial to the disaster threatens to institutionalize and crystallize a single narrative and collective memory, individuals and families resist this process through their engagement with the site and their creative and imaginative nostalgic practices.
Archaeological research of dismantled homes at the Albany Bulb in the San Francisco Bay, California, prompted me to rethink the category of “homelessness” and the temporal boundaries of archaeological research. This paper treats the history of people who called this landfill‐turned‐park home as part of broad processes of redevelopment and displacement in the Bay Area and beyond. Archaeological and artistic research provide a critical methodology through which I reflect on contemporary struggles for homeless rights and conflicts over who needs to be “cleaned up.”
Nas últimas décadas começaram a se consolidar linhas de pesquisa associadas ao que pode ser entendido como Arqueologia Contemporânea. Entre essas, talvez uma das que mais visibilidade e impacto tiveram foi a chamada Arqueologia da Repressão e da Resistência, campo de pesquisa que ainda possui barreiras político-acadêmicas para ultrapassar. Uma delas foi superada ano passado, quando, pela primeira vez, foram implementadas intervenções arqueológicas em um centro de detenção da ditadura civil-militar brasileira com o objetivo de estudar suas materialidades e as experiências cotidianas a elas relacionadas. Essa pesquisa arqueológica teve um caráter diagnóstico e foi realizada no DOPS/MG para subsidiar a futura criação do Memorial de Direitos Humanos no local. Nesse texto serão apresentadas as atividades desenvolvidas durante esse trabalho que, além de pioneiro, tem como objeto de estudo um importante órgão repressivo da ditadura civil-militar em Minas Gerais.
City building is a future‐oriented process that rests on the assumption that urban growth and transformation through capital investment and market competition is both expected and natural. Yet the fulfilment of this promise goes hand‐in‐hand with underachievement and failure. While much is known about the dynamics of urban growth and regeneration, very little is understood about the dynamics of urban decline and ruin. Decline is not simply the absence of growth. Theorizing the production of decline requires that we focus attention on how abandonment and neglect introduce ample opportunities for profit‐making whereby predatory entrepreneurs find ways to extract value from the dead and dying remains of the built environment. Just as city building is the result of profit‐yielding investment choices under the rule of real estate capital, city unbuilding is the outcome of extractive economies of plunder and pillage.
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted nearly every facet of our world, including some of the most fundamental forms of human behavior and our conception of the social. Everyday activities now pose a risk to individuals and to society as a whole. This radical shift in how we live has produced a wide array of material responses across the globe. This photo essay seeks to open up dialogue and ask questions about the numerous forms of COVID-19 materiality and altered landscapes that the authors have chronicled, witnessed, documented and cataloged in their communities, using archaeological and ethnographic methods. This materiality includes chalk art, graffiti, painted rocks and signage placed in both public and private spaces within the project authors’ communities. In framing our questions, we draw upon theoretical frameworks in the fields of cultural trauma studies, cultural anthropology and contemporary archaeology.
Between December 2016 and February 2018, the author surveyed Jesus College, Cambridge (England) for graffiti, considering why and by whom the findings were made. 1,076 individual and identifiable examples dating from the late 16th to late 20th century were recorded including names, initials (and associated dates), apotropaic symbols and figurative graffiti. It is argued that not only does the graffiti suggest the various ways in which individuals 'made their mark' as a stamp of ownership over a particular space, but how they protected themselves against perceived malevolent forces. This article also represents the first comprehensive graffiti survey of the most historic buildings at the core of one of the oldest educational establishments in the UK.
The paper presents results of the study, which goal was to identify the structure of nightlife industry and the level of concentration of nightlife industry premises in the most attractive part of the central district of Warsaw. For the purpose of the study, the database of nightlife premises within relevant categories i.e. restaurants, coffee shops, bars and clubs was prepared. Specific location and time of operation of every premise were determined. Location patterns of every category of premises and the rhythm of activities were identified. The results of the study show that, just like retail commerce, restaurants and coffee shops prefer location on main streets and near tourists attractions, while bars and clubs are grouped in small clusters and typically are located in adjacent areas. The opening hours of the premises make the nightlife in this area short. The study shows
that the city “goes to bed early” even in the most attractive, central location with potential to develop nightlife activities. The central part of the city cannot be considered a nightlife entertainment district.
This chapter addresses the rise of night-time economies in two major countries in the Global North (Germany and Japan) from a cultural policy perspective, focusing in particular on Berlin and Tokyo as major night-time hubs. Building on existing research, which has typically focused on major Western economic hubs like London and New York, the paper makes two main contributions by (1) comparing the development of cultural policy in two distinct global regions and (2) highlighting the role of culture and cultural histories, spaces and meanings in shaping relevant policies. The research draws on a range of different sources, including policy documents, interviews with policymakers, interviews with night-time workers in Berlin and Tokyo and relevant statistical data.The chapter reports several interesting findings. (1) Policy formation in both of these seemingly disparate countries is strongly influenced by the historical conflation of power and culture. (2) In both cases, the emergence of a flourishing night-time economy is driven by intermittent state policy supports that lack any clear or definitive power. (3) Linear and holistic models fail to account for inequities in the spatial distribution, success and downfall of night-time economies.The paper enhances existing understanding of policy cycles that account for these complex entanglements and resists any stereotypical account of cultural planning and distribution.
The night has been the subject of multiple readings by the social and human sciences, as well as it has inspired multiple narratives throughout history, literature and popular culture. However, the study of nightlife, practices, and actors only gained attention in recent years. The appearance of “mayors of the night” with the intention of improving urban governance during this period and thus guaranteeing needs, rights and services is the result of a progressive change in the local political paradigm, which begins to face this space-time as a “new” opportunity for its economic, social and cultural development. We could say that the night and the activities that take place in it begin to be projected as forms of tourist attraction, whether for their leisure activities such as discos, parties or other forms of fun; or because of its cultural potential, such as the White Nights. Contemporary urban night implies having active professionals, capable of reacting to any incident, such as the case of health professionals, but also maintaining those professions – often illegal – that tend to be considered problematic or hidden as could be prostitution. Surveillance and control during this period is also a good example of active professions, such as the case of the police, surveillance companies, video-doorman, or firefighters. It has never been so easy to commute in the urban space, public transport normally meets the needs of users, and the emergence of new forms of transport resulting from the circular economy, both of people and goods, completes the demand, not without controversy. There are many different ways to approach the night, but here we collect some of the communications that participated during the I International Conference on Night Studies, that t
This short essay is an introduction to a thematic collection of three articles on urban erasures. This essay provides an overview of the articles and situates the collection at the intersection of critical heritage studies, contemporary archaeology, and collaborative community‐based research.
These annual review essays focus on what we as archaeologists are doing year by year. Many themes continue on from review to review, waxing and waning, not unlike the bell curves of a traditional pottery seriation. Each year, themes are highlighted and presented in varied ways according to the orientation and aims of the reviewer. All do a masterful job of curating the vast range of what archaeologists were, in each annual period, currently producing. My review follows in the footsteps of its predecessors, summarizing an array of new and exciting research, and describing how agendas presented in 2017 cluster around sets of related questions and aims. It will also look at the growing literature that asks, in one way or another, fundamental questions about what archaeology really is and why we pursue it. In this time when the value of academic pursuits and scientific perspectives are being highly scrutinized in politics and popular culture, archaeologists are faced with the uncomfortable question of “What is it, really, that we should be doing?” [archaeology, current issues, public archaeology, digital archaeology].
At the end of Antiquity ’s ninetieth year, this issue of NBC looks at a selection of new books through the eyes of Antiquity ’s founder: O.G.S. Crawford. He died exactly 60 years ago, but were he to be resurrected in 2017, what would he make of archaeology today? What would be familiar? And what developments would surprise him? He would undoubtedly scour Antiquity to bring himself up to date, but he might also turn to some introductory texts for a panorama of the modern archaeological landscape; he would have plenty to choose from.
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