Landscape

As we saw in the previous chapter, many close comparisons exist between the archaeology of the contemporary past and that of earlier periods, most obviously in the way we conceptualize and investigate sites as places or loci of human activity through the material traces left behind. We saw how this approach, this archaeological methodology, applies equally to prehistoric settlements and abandoned office spaces that we ourselves have occupied. Another comparison concerns the question of landscape, and the ways in which human activity occurs within and across landscape; how it can be influenced by the properties of landscape, whether physical or social; how the present landscape is the result of actions, activities, and attitudes in the past, and their collective and cumulative impact over time; and how we can helpfully study human activity at this broader scale. We are not talking here about particular landscapes that become fossilized at a certain time, coincident for example with their abandonment or some natural catastrophe: the Roman townscape of Pompeii for example; the Palaeolithic land surfaces at Boxgrove (West Sussex); or nuclear testing facilities of the western United States, closed or downgraded at the end of the Cold War. Rather, for the contemporary past, we are (or at least should be) referring to landscape in a more holistic sense: the everything, the everywhere, and of course—what makes it so interesting and so relevant that we examine this as archaeologists—the everyday. This scale of inquiry, the sheer amount of stuff within the contemporary landscape, and the new technologies that make it possible now to begin making sense of all this material, is one of the main challenges and benefits of exploring the archaeology of the late modern world. This chapter returns initially to the principles of historic landscape characterization or ‘HLC’, first discussed in Chapter 3, to think further about investigations of this kind, and how, for example, national and international patterns of change and use can be studied archaeologically.

Introduction

How can we use the methods of archaeology to explore contemporary social phenomena? In what ways can the approaches of a discipline that has been developed to explore the distant past be used to understand the present, and should we even try? How can the ‘excavation’ of the recent past bring to light new insights into what it means to be ‘us’? These are the questions that have absorbed a new generation of scholars who seek to draw on the skills of archaeology to study an increasingly contemporary past and attempt to make the familiar past ‘unfamiliar’ (cf. Graves-Brown 2000a) by exploring its hidden, forgotten, and abject qualities and utilizing the powerful rhetoric of archaeological recovery in the retrieval of recent memories through the study of present-day material culture. This book aims to explore what happens if we take an archaeological approach to contemporary, late modern, post-industrial societies. It acts as an introduction both to the ways in which archaeologists approach the study of the recent and contemporary past, and to the interdisciplinary field of modern material culture studies more generally. We hope it will be of interest not only to students and practitioners of archaeology, but also to scholars who work within the broad interdisciplinary field of modern material culture studies— anthropologists, sociologists, historians of technology and science, and psychologists—in developing a new agenda for the study of the materiality of late modern societies. Because knowing more about our own society and how it functions is an issue of broad public concern, we have also tried to write this book in such a way that the reader who is not a specialist, but who has a casual interest in the manner in which archaeologists and others study contemporary material culture, will also be engaged by it. The book’s principal focus is the archaeology of developed, postindustrial societies during the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. Our emphasis is the period after about 1950, though the examples in Part II deliberately focus on the years after c.1970, a time which for us is literally the contemporary past, the period of our own lives and experiences.

Discussion and Conclusion

This book has been written at a time when late modern societies are experiencing a period of enormous social and economic upheaval. Some commentators have suggested that late modern societies should be seen as defunct, or at best in decline. This forecast of the end of late modern societies looms larger than it has ever done before. But, in what ways will this influence the archaeology of the contemporary past as a discipline, and its agenda as we have charted it in this book? In many ways, the need for an archaeology of the late modern period has become even more urgent in the light of these changes. Any discipline that allows us to look at the nature of late modern societies from a different perspective will help us to understand the critical points at which societies change, and to put this information into practice in the future. But what if we are in a period that heralds the onset of a new form of society? Will the archaeology of the contemporary past simply become another period study, like the archaeology of the Neolithic for example? Although we have focused much of our discussion on the nature of late modern societies, we argue that we need an archaeology of ‘now’ as much as we need one that explores social responses to the very recent past that got us here. The central theme of this book is the need to develop an archaeology that allows us to be more self-aware and critically reflexive by understanding the nature of contemporary society and its engagement with the material world, as well as our recent and deeper past. It is this single point that is at the core of our argument—that we need to use the approaches of archaeology not only to study the roots of our society, but also to understand our present lives. Thus archaeology becomes not only a discipline for recording objects, places, and practices that are extinct or have fallen into ruin, but develops a series of tools alongside its more conventional ones for scrutinizing objects, places, and practices within our own society that are still in use.

Artefacts

In the Wrst part of the book we considered a number of influences on the emergence of an archaeology of the contemporary past, from the interests in contemporary small-scale societies that developed as part of the New Archaeology in the 1960s and 1970s, to the use of contemporary case studies to address particular archaeological debates about the relationship between material culture and social behaviour posed by post-processual archaeologists in the 1980s and 1990s. We have seen how the archaeology of the recent past began with a focus on the First and Second World Wars, and then the Cold War, eventually to encompass a Weld that is concerned with the archaeology of a much wider range of events that have only just passed or are still occurring today (e.g. Penrose 2007). In Chapter 3 we looked in detail at the sorts of Weld methodologies that are being applied by archaeologists of the recent and contemporary past, considering whether their Weld methods might be understood to be distinct from other forms of archaeology. In Chapter 4 we looked at the relationship between archaeology and other disciplines that focus on contemporary materiality, in particular anthropology, material culture studies, art, and documentary photography. And in Chapter 5 we explored some reasons why archaeologists might have developed an interest in the contemporary world, and the period of late modernity in particular, through an exploration of some of the conditions of late modernity that make it distinct from the periods that precede it. In the second part of the book, we look in more detail at how we might approach the archaeology of the contemporary world, with reference to a series of case studies. As you read through this second part, you will notice that one of its distinguishing features is its dual perspective. We consider on the one hand places and material practices that are essentially extinct or have ceased to function, and on the other those places and practices that are still functioning, or, in Tim Cresswell’s (2004: 37) words, are ‘still becoming’.

Theory and Politics

If we are to undertake an archaeology of the contemporary past, we need Wrst to be able to characterize it—to understand both those quotidian aspects of contemporary life as well as what makes this period distinct from other periods that preceded it. Although we have already suggested in Chapter 1 that the archaeology of the contemporary past should not be considered a period study, it is nonetheless important to understand both the continuities and discontinuities in contemporary life that might form the object of an archaeology of the present. This chapter will introduce a theoretical framework on which to build an archaeology of the contemporary past through a consideration of what various cultural theorists have written about the nature of the subject and its relevance to the study of contemporary places and material culture. There is a large literature on the nature of modernity and late modernity (a term we use to describe both ‘postmodernity’ and ‘supermodernity’ in a historical sense, see further discussion below), from which we have drawn a selection that we consider helpful in understanding the topic of contemporary archaeology, and that provides a theoretical background to the work of archaeologists who study the contemporary past. This chapter will also explore the ways in which archaeology as a form of documentation becomes a political and social intervention when its gaze is turned towards the contemporary past. We argue that this political dimension is one of the defining characteristics of the archaeology of the contemporary past. Although we noted in Chapter 1 that this is not a book about heritage, the issue of heritage is in many ways integral to understanding the role of contemporary archaeology, as it relates to the ways in which we engage with, and understand, the past in the present. Indeed, in this chapter we argue that the rise of a heritage industry is itself a tangible artefact of the same impulse that led to the rise of contemporary archaeology as a distinct Weld of study (see also Ferguson, Harrison, and Weinbren 2010). At the same time, understanding these impulses that have given rise to heritage and the archaeology of the recent past helps us to understand what makes the period unique, and lays the foundation for a thematic framework for undertaking an archaeology of the contemporary past.

A Disciplinary (Pre)History

Following the brief definition and discussion of the archaeology of the contemporary past provided in Chapter 1, this chapter will consider the academic context for the development of the archaeology of the contemporary past and its emergence in the years surrounding the Millennium. It then briefly surveys and summarizes the topics which have emerged as areas of focus amongst archaeologists working in the field over the past decade. It will chart the important role of commercial archaeology and developer funding in the emergence of the archaeology of the contemporary past, and look at the role of national heritage agencies and local authorities. Another major issue in this chapter is the ways in which the archaeology of the recent and contemporary past has developed as a means of addressing cultural diversity and recent migrant communities and their heritage, which is inevitably and by definition ‘contemporary’ albeit often with reference to other times and places. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the relationship between historical archaeology and the archaeology of the contemporary past, considering claims for and against seeing it as a discipline in its own right. It is now a decade since the publication of two key books which have been central to the establishment of the archaeology of the contem-porary past as a specific area of study within the English speaking world—Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture edited by Paul Graves-Brown (2000b), and Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past edited by Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas (2001e). As Buchli (2007: 115) points out however, archaeologists have had a long interest in studying contemporary material culture, dating back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and including Pitt-Rivers’s studies of contemporary rifles while working as a military officer, and Kroeber’s (1919) study of changes in contemporary women’s dress lengths. Nonetheless, throughout most of the twentieth century, archaeology has concerned itself almost exclusively with the study of the distant past, accepting a conservative and literal definition of archaeology as something that should focus only on that which is ancient, or ‘archaic’.

Non-Places and Virtual Worlds

In previous chapters we have considered how we might take an archaeological approach to the contemporary or very recent past in what would be recognized to be a fairly conventional series of archaeological ‘realms’—artefacts, places, and landscape. In this chapter, we will explore some of the ways in which an archaeological approach might be taken to some of the most distinctive features of late modernity. In Chapter 5, we explored a number of these features, highlighting non-places, the work of the imagination, and the virtual as key areas for archaeological inquiry. This chapter takes up some of the challenges of these new materialities (and, indeed, the new ‘virtualities’) of late modernity, considering the ways in which an archaeological approach to the contemporary world might help illuminate aspects of late modernity that have not previously been well understood. As in previous chapters in Part II, this chapter is broken into a number of sections reflecting broad themes relating to the distinctive features of late-modern everyday life—non-places; virtual worlds; experience economies and the work of the imagination; and hyperconsumerism and globalization. In Chapter 5 we looked in detail at Augé’s (1995) concept of the ‘non-place’. Augé uses this term to describe a whole series of spaces in contemporary society—airport lounges, shopping malls, motorways—that he suggests are to be distinguished from ‘places’, in the sense in which these spaces are not relational, historical, or concerned with the establishment of a sense of identity (all those things that characterize the traditional social anthropologist’s interest in ‘place’). These ‘non-places’ are primarily associated with the experience of travel or transit, and reflect the simultaneous time– space expansion and compression that he associates with late modernity. We suggested that such places rely not only on aspects of their generic design, but also on a series of ‘technologies of isolation’ that work together to produce a characteristic feeling of solitude and the emptying of consciousness discussed in Augé’s work.

Sites

Sites are the staple of archaeological investigation, forming the basis of many an excavation or survey project, often within a wider landscape study where it is the relationships between sites that can matter more. Think of any archaeological project or great excavation of the nineteenth or twentieth century, and you have your archaeological site, defined by convention as incorporating either settlement or industrial, religious, or military remains. These sites are often the subject of either a lengthy process of investigation and then post-excavation analysis leading to publication of results, or sometimes a short Weld evaluation prior to their destruction through development or preservation in situ. Their initial discovery may be newsworthy, and perhaps the result of some significant new development, a new landmark in the making. As we have seen, by convention archaeologists and curators generally treat those places and objects from the past as precious, valued resources for their very historicity and their cultural value, and often (correctly) seek their protection from destructive forces of the present and future. But our view is slightly different. We do not recognize the distinction between that which is old/ancient and matters, and that which is new and does not. Rather we recognize all material culture, the artefacts and sites and the wider landscape, as being suitable for archaeological inquiry and potentially holding value for this reason: not just the objects of the deeper past threatened with destruction, but also the contemporary office building that now occupies the site. Archaeology of the contemporary past even gives recognition to the ‘site to be’, the places planned for the future, a site that exists only on a planning board or an architect’s computer, or as a model, or even in the mind. With the archaeology of the contemporary past, the past, present, and future are woven together in a way that gives the subject complexity, introduces new and unforeseen challenges and difficulties, and equally gives it a heightened sense of social relevance and meaning. That said, for archaeology of the contemporary past, many of the same rules apply as for earlier periods, although, as we have seen, the sheer numbers of modern sites, and the spatial continuity of human activity and our perception and experience of it, do complicate things somewhat.

Working Across Disciplines

In the previous chapter, we considered those methodologies that might be seen to characterize the archaeology of the contemporary past. One of the issues raised there was the extent to which an archaeology of the contemporary past is defined by, and is even reliant upon, working with and across a series of different academic disciplines and areas of subject specialisms. In this chapter, we will look in more detail at the relationship between the archaeology of the contemporary past and the various academic disciplines on which it draws and with which it overlaps. Rather than a field defined by a series of other academic disciplines, we argue that the archaeology of the contemporary past emerges from this review as a discipline characterized by a particular vision and approach to the material culture of the contemporary world. These issues are explored in relation to various examples which illustrate both the similarities and differences between an archaeology of the contemporary past, and those various specialisms with which it has close relations. This chapter will also explore the relationship between the archaeology of the contemporary past and contemporary art, both in terms of artistic engagements with the archaeology of the contemporary past and the idea of archaeology as a form of contemporary artistic practice. A number of authors have written in detail about the historical relationship between archaeology and anthropology (e.g. Gosden 1999), and we do not have space to cover the topic in the detail it deserves here. The relationship between archaeology and anthropology is, however, particularly relevant when we are considering the archaeology of the contemporary past, as in almost all instances we are considering the material remains of societies contemporary with us. Archaeology and anthropology, although closely related, have developed along divergent lines in the different countries of the world in which they are practised, so for this reason we will focus our discussion on the historical relationship between archaeology and anthropology in North America and Britain, and the role of an ‘anthropological archaeology’ in approaches to the archaeology of the contemporary past.

Field Methods

In Chapter 1 we suggested that the archaeology of the contemporary past is a critical inquiry into the present using archaeological approaches originally developed to look at the past. But how, precisely, does one undertake an archaeological study of the contemporary past, and what do practitioners more familiar with earlier periods bring with them to this particular type of archaeological enquiry? Is this archaeology of the very recent past so different to that of earlier periods? Is it simply a matter of transferring skills from more familiar grounds of the deeper past? We suggest that to large extent it is, though recognizing at least one key difference: the degree to which our diverse cultural backgrounds and life experiences will influence the way we think about and interpret material remains that often seem closely familiar. In this chapter we look particularly at the ways in which an archaeology of the contemporary past is informed by oral accounts and living memories, and at approaches to recording and analysing complex and multi-layered contemporary landscapes in which the past is manifest as an integral part of the present. Following the work of Michael Schiffer (1987), most archaeologists are used to thinking about the archaeological record as the cumulative product of both cultural and natural forces over the full course of human existence, from the Lower Palaeolithic until the moment just passed. But there are obvious differences with the way human behaviour is constructed and transformed into an archaeological record. When considering the archaeology of the contemporary past, for example, many of the natural processes that lead to the decay and deterioration of traditional archaeological sites are not present. And in many ways, the cultural site formation processes are more varied, resulting in archaeological sites of the recent past being either extremely well or very poorly preserved. Comparatively few modern buildings simply deteriorate for example, the more likely outcome being a decision to renovate, modernize, upgrade, or demolish and replace. Those buildings and places that are just abandoned to their fate are interesting because they are often adopted for truly alternative uses, sometimes becoming the characteristic places of those at the margins of contemporary society, as squats for example, or places for play, or where drugs are taken and alcohol consumed.