Heritage is almost univocally conceived of as valuable and good, something we care for and preserve for ourselves and future generations. Although traditionally associated with the unique and monumental, heritage has over the last decades been broadened in response to claims to incorporate more diverse and globally representative legacies. While such claims are of course welcome, they do not embrace the bulging unruly and obnoxious legacies that now haunts us; legacies that have become so conspicuously manifest that they are claimed diagnostic of a new epoch, the Anthropocene.
This book targets this exclusion. It claims that the current ‘clash’ between prevailing conceptions of heritage as something confined, wished for and thus worth saving, and the unruly legacies ignoring such work of purification, urges a reconsideration of strategies and rationales for how to ‘deal with’ heritage. Through multidisciplinary approaches, ranging from archaeology and heritage studies to philosophy and environmental politics, the contributions bring heritage into dialogue with a wide range of topics including industrialisation, material profusion, modernist architectural material, coastal reclamations, barbed wire, and naval mines. The result is a volume that profoundly challenges traditional understandings of heritage as an exclusive reserve of things selected and managed by us.
List of Illustrations List of Contributors Introduction (Bjørnar Julius Olsen, Stein Farstadvoll and Geneviève Godin, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Norway) Part I: The Matter of Unruliness 1. The Ethics of the Wild (Levi R. Bryant, Collin College, USA) 2. Picturing Ghosts (Julie de Vos, Spanish National Research Council, Spain) 3. Artificting Archaeology: Joanna Rajkowska’s Aquarius (2009) and Robert Kusmirowski’s The Graduation Tower (2014) (Monika Stobiecka, University of Warsaw, Poland) 4. Heritage Lost and Found: Cruel Optimism and Climate Futures (Caitlin DeSilvey, University of Exeter, UK) 5. In Praise of What There Is (Bjørnar Olsen, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Norway) Part II: Technology and Ecological Becomings 6. The Buick At the End of the World: Nature, Technology, and the Strange Legacies of the Century of Automobility (Timothy James LeCain, Montana State University, USA) 7. Things of the Anthropocene: The Unruly Heritage of Coastal Reclamations in Japan (Denis Byrne, Western Sydney University, Australia) 8. Between Use and Abandonment: An Archaeology of Mothballing (Anatolijs Venovcevs, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Norway) 9. Concrete and the Contemporary (Torgeir Rinke Bangstad, University of Bergen, Norway) Part III: Aftermaths and Unruly Legacies 10. Retouching the Bronze Age: Unruly Rock Art (Mats Burström, Stockholm University, Sweden) 11. Managing Scars of Terror in Norway’s Government Quarter and the Shifting Memory Values of VG’s Newspaper Panel (Hein B. Bjerck, NTNU University Museum, Norway and Elin Andreassen, Independent Scholar, Norway) 12. Unruly monsters: Submarine Mines in the Baltic region (Mirja Arnshav, Stockholm University, Sweden) 13 Wayward Ruins: Manifestations of Unruliness in and of a German Second World War Luftwaffe Storage camp in Pasvik/Paccvei Valley (Stein Farstadvoll, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Norway) Part IV: Postscript Reflections 14. Archaeological Imaginations: Unruly Heritage Lessons for the Anthropocene (Þóra Pétursdóttir, University of Oslo, Norway) Notes Bibliography Index
Bjørnar Julius Olsen is Professor of Archaeology at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Stein Farstadvoll is Associate Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Geneviève Godin is an independent scholar and former Doctoral Research Fellow at UiT The Arctic University of Norway.
Reviews for Unruly Heritage: Archaeologies of the Anthropocene
In the current context of environmental change and uncertainty, Unruly Heritage is a timely contribution that provides a compelling reflection on the more-than-human world we inhabit. The concept of the ‘unruly’ challenges the heritage paradigm by considering elements that cannot be easily tamed or neatly categorised. The breadth of this edited collection highlights the complex material entanglements that shape legacies. -- Nadia Bartolini, Associate Lecturer in Cultural Heritage Studies, UCL Institute of Archaeology, UK
