Remains of the day
Three years ago, archaeologists at Bristol University embarked on a unique research project: the excavation of a 1991 Ford Transit van. After some background research, they carefully collected up all the dog hairs and sweet wrappers before stripping back the layers of carpet, plywood lining, metal and rust. Some of their discoveries were fairly trivial, such as the revelation that the van's roof was badly dented after serving as an impromptu diving board at a riotous Christmas party. But there were also intriguing insights into social history. After fingerprint dusting on the bodywork drew a blank, they learned that the van was one of the first vehicles in the country to be built entirely by robots, which coincided with a wave of redundancies at Ford's Southampton plant. Now the dismantled van has become the flagship project for a booming scholarly area, the archaeology of the "contemporary past".
This is not as great a departure as you might think. The popular image of archaeology may be about romantic quests to uncover lost civilisations, but deep excavation is only one part of a field that begins with the mundane reading of documents, geophysical surveys and surface investigations. There is no reason why any of this needs to be limited to the ancient or exotic. Even Channel 4's Time Team, who generally get excited about Roman bathhouses and Saxon burial grounds, have run programmes about the D-Day landings and warplane crash sites.
Contemporary archaeology is a response to the problem of preserving and recording our disposable, rapidly changing culture. The structures of the postwar era - 1960s tower blocks, mobile-phone masts, distribution warehouses, retail parks - are fairly temporary and likely to disappear quickly. That is why Change and Creation, an archaeological project on the late 20th-century landscape run by English Heritage, is focusing on transient sites such as the code-breaking huts at Bletchley Park or the Greenham Common peace camp. The latter is now slowly turning from airbase concrete to its original grassy state, but is offering up piecemeal evidence of its former life in the form of moss-covered children's toys and anti-American graffiti.
All historians, and not merely archaeologists, are likely to encounter difficulties researching our own era because so much of the material will be ephemeral or intangible. The historian Niall Ferguson recently said that he did not envy future members of his profession, because of the "disappearing decision trail" in the contemporary period. The archival record of the present day is likely to be both too scarce and too abundant. Email databases may not survive, or they will be so full that no scholar will know where to start, or they will be unreadable because of changes to hardware or software. So perhaps we will have to rely on the archaeologists, whose whole training teaches them to make wider deductions from fragmentary material remains - the smudge of black on pottery providing proof of a hearth, for example.
Read entire article at New Statesman
This is not as great a departure as you might think. The popular image of archaeology may be about romantic quests to uncover lost civilisations, but deep excavation is only one part of a field that begins with the mundane reading of documents, geophysical surveys and surface investigations. There is no reason why any of this needs to be limited to the ancient or exotic. Even Channel 4's Time Team, who generally get excited about Roman bathhouses and Saxon burial grounds, have run programmes about the D-Day landings and warplane crash sites.
Contemporary archaeology is a response to the problem of preserving and recording our disposable, rapidly changing culture. The structures of the postwar era - 1960s tower blocks, mobile-phone masts, distribution warehouses, retail parks - are fairly temporary and likely to disappear quickly. That is why Change and Creation, an archaeological project on the late 20th-century landscape run by English Heritage, is focusing on transient sites such as the code-breaking huts at Bletchley Park or the Greenham Common peace camp. The latter is now slowly turning from airbase concrete to its original grassy state, but is offering up piecemeal evidence of its former life in the form of moss-covered children's toys and anti-American graffiti.
All historians, and not merely archaeologists, are likely to encounter difficulties researching our own era because so much of the material will be ephemeral or intangible. The historian Niall Ferguson recently said that he did not envy future members of his profession, because of the "disappearing decision trail" in the contemporary period. The archival record of the present day is likely to be both too scarce and too abundant. Email databases may not survive, or they will be so full that no scholar will know where to start, or they will be unreadable because of changes to hardware or software. So perhaps we will have to rely on the archaeologists, whose whole training teaches them to make wider deductions from fragmentary material remains - the smudge of black on pottery providing proof of a hearth, for example.