A Fearsome Heritage

Diverse Legacies of the Cold War

Dr John Schofield, Wayne Cocroft, Dr John Schofield, Wayne Cocroft

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781598742589
• eBook ISBN: 9781315435831
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

From massive nuclear test sites to the more subtle material realities of everyday life, the influence of the Cold War on modern culture has been profound and global. Fearsome Legacies unites innovative work on the interpretation and management of Cold War heritage from fields including archaeology, history, art and architecture, and cultural studies. Contributors understand material culture in its broadest sense, examining objects in outer space, domestic space, landscapes, and artistic spaces. They tackle interpretive challenges and controversies, including in museum exhibits, heritage sites, archaeological sites, and other historic and public venues. With over 150 color photos and illustrations, including a photographic essay, readers can feel the profound visual impact of this material culture.

1

Introduction: Cold War, diversity and contemporary archaeology

JOHN SCHOFIELD and WAYNE COCROFT

This book provides a critical assessment of the places, events, people and things that together constitute the contemporary archaeology of the Cold War era. This was a period – roughly 1946–89 – materially represented by unprecedented developments in weapons technology accompanied by a massive military construction effort. Geopolitical tensions were a defining characteristic, and the Cold War stand-off imposed an apparently permanent global division between communism and capitalism. This is exclusively northern-hemisphere heritage in a way, even though the influence of the Cold War was transglobal, as seen for example in trade networks and the participation in (or boycott of) cultural events – the less tangible legacies of the Cold War era, but a significant dimension nevertheless and one this volume also seeks to address. Here the archaeological record is thus unfiltered by time, or the biases of preservation and social intervention; the archaeological record is essentially complete and wholly representative of the historic era now known as the Cold War.

This collection of essays and images has a wider point to make about the archaeological record, and about heritage in general: that we don’t simply inherit from the past, but rather actively engage with it – creating new archaeological sites and assemblages, altering those that existed previously and reinterpreting the whole in new and previously unforeseen ways. The work of contemporary artists is therefore included in this collection, being themselves interpretations of Cold War material culture, but also (now, after the event) archaeological sites or interventions in their own right (Schofield 2006). These artistic works include film, video and music, as well as recognising archaeological field survey as performance. But is this archaeology? Colin Renfrew believes so. He explains:

The world of the visual arts today is made up of tens of thousands of individuals, most of them doing their own thing. Among them are creative thinkers and workers who are nibbling away all the time at what we think we know about the world, at our assumptions, at our preconceptions. Moreover, the insights that [artists] offer are not in the form of words, of long and heavy texts. They come to us through the eyes, and sometimes the other senses, offering us direct perceptions from which we may sometimes come to share their insights. The visual explorations … offer a fundamental resource for anyone who wants to make … sense of the world.… It is not that this resource offers new answers, or that it will directly tell us how we should understand the world. On the contrary, it offers us new, often paradoxical experiences, which show us how we have understood, or only imperfectly mastered, what we think we know. (2003, 7–8)

It is hard to be certain now, but the idea for this book probably has its origin in meetings and discussions between us and two of these artists – Louise K Wilson and Angus Boulton – separately, some time after the millennium. In these discussions it first became obvious to us that Cold War material culture was of interest in many ways to a wide and diverse group, from archaeologists to artists, and from historians and sociologists to politicians. We were all interested in it for different reasons, but ultimately for the same reason – that these material remains tell us about the world we know, and that by understanding its material remains we can begin to question the familiar world around us. From the point that we realised this, and began to seek out further studies of Cold War material culture, the conference session from which this book derives became inevitable. Graham Fairclough’s chapter refers to the political context surrounding the World Archaeological Congress (WAC) at Washington DC, in summer 2003, causing some participants to withdraw in opposition to the USA’s involvement in Iraq. The fact that our session was in Washington at this time (and that we then organised a Cold War round table in St Petersburg later the same year) seemed fitting. All of the participants made their own decisions on whether or not to attend WAC, and for us at least, the decision to attend and debate military heritage and material culture at a time of political unease and uncertainty was preferred. War and heritage in fact became a major theme of the congress, with other sessions and contributions. But ours was perhaps the most diverse and the least archaeological – in the conventional sense – of them all. Our session ‘briefing’ made this point, and part of it is repeated here:

Following the end of World War II came the Cold War, in which the conflicting ideologies of East and West led to escalations in the arms race, and increased militarisation around the globe. In the years 1946–89 this was a world in which the three minute warning was a constant threat and the shadow of the mushroom cloud an enduring image.

At WAC4 in 1999 a session on modern military remains described some of this legacy [now published as Schofield et al. 2002]: nuclear test sites in the Nevada Desert and giant radar installations in Alaska. But the legacies of the Cold War went far beyond military installations, embracing or influencing many aspects of popular culture, science and technology, architecture, landscape and people’s perceptions of the world; of their locality (where they lived close to military installations) and of the future. Many of course believed there would be no future, a belief that grew at times of international crisis.

The conference session, and now the book, sought to document and deconstruct these diverse interests, taking material culture in its broadest sense, and exploring the ownership and relevance of the past to a range of communities and interest groups. The biologist EO Wilson has made a strong case for the unity of intellectual disciplines in his book Consilience (1998), and we concur with this vision for the academy. Like the session before it, this book crosses many borders (intellectual, ideological and geographical), including for example: peoples displaced by the location of nuclear testing grounds (described in the chapters by Smith and by Beck, Drollinger and Schofield); the difficulty of treating Cold War sites as cultural heritage (Beazley), the inspiration for artists and musicians of the events or architecture of the Cold War (Boulton, Wilson, Kyriakides, Watson); the role of museum curators (Vining, Hacker) and those charged with finding a new use for what are often massive and functional remains (Fiorato); and finally the role of archaeologists (Gorman and O’Leary, Cocroft), anthropologists (Buchli), conservation bodies (Feversham and Schmidt) and cultural historians (Steingrover) in documenting and interpreting the Cold War’s material remains. And these material remains are extraordinary in their diversity: domestic appliances, satellites, films and photographs, missiles and their shelters, parts of nuclear submarines, military uniforms and the subtle traces of the Berlin Wall, being the ‘first generation’ material record – objects of the Cold War; a ‘second generation’ being those artistic projects and installations influenced by the Cold War but which postdate its closure.

The point of film is worth elaborating upon here, as it reflects the wider point of the volume, not as a conventional archaeology of an historic period, but one that draws out the wider influences of a range of practitioners who share the ambition of documenting and interpreting – and in some cases deconstructing and reassembling – past events. Reinhild Steingröver documents East German filmmaking at the time of the Change, c.1989–90. While her contribution stands in part as literary critique it also provides an unique contribution to this volume, emphasising how the contemporary past can be studied in a multitude of different ways, given the diversity of sources and material cultures available for research. The films are archives, documents – even artefacts – and we as archaeologists can examine these, just as we can early photographs, paintings and representations. But in constructing an archaeology of the contemporary past we also recognise that specific pieces of research are best conducted by those most familiar with the materials and the methodologies best suited to their examination. Hence the inclusion of Steingrover’s contribution alongside those of artists and composers.

After Graham Fairclough’s introduction, the book explores this diversity through examples that are indicative of a wide field of research, being projects known to us prior to or immediately after WAC 2003. The book is strongly visual, deliberately so to emphasise the strength and symbolism of the visual image. In Wilson’s, and particularly Boulton’s and Watson’s chapters, the focus is the photographic essays each has provided. In the case of Kyriakides’ contribution, musical compositions are described, with links to a specially commissioned web page where these sounds of the Cold War can be heard. Heritage management is a recurring theme: Cocroft and Fiorato, for example, discuss the approach taken to managing Cold War sites in England, while Beazley, Gorman and O’Leary, and Feversham and Schmidt all raise issues concerning World Heritage Site status.

A Fearsome Heritage examines what archaeology can contribute to understanding the Cold War and all that it entailed. By exploring diversity in this way we use archaeology in its broadest sense to demonstrate the strong influence of the Cold War on modern culture and on perceptions of the world in which we live – a kind of critique on modern life at a time when a return to arms looks increasingly likely.

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We are grateful to all of our participants and contributors for their enthusiasm for this project, and for their support in helping us bring it to publication. It has been a particular pleasure to work with those from other disciplines less familiar to us, and whose rather different take on the subject has been both stimulating and refreshing. We are grateful also to staff at Left Coast Press, and in particular to Jennifer Collier and Ginny Hoffman, for their assistance and support, and to English Heritage for supporting this project and our participation in the conference from which this book derives. English Heritage also provided a financial contribution to Left Coast Press, allowing the inclusion of more colour imagery than would otherwise have been possible. Finally, we are indebted to Mark Leone and another anonymous referee for their advice and assistance in producing the final manuscript. Other acknowledgements are included in the individual chapters of the book.

REFERENCES

Renfrew, C (2003) Figuring It Out: The Parallel Visions of Artists and Archaeologists, London: Thames and Hudson

Schofield, J (2006) Constructing Place: When Artists and Archaeologists Meet, eBook published at http://diffusion.org.uk/#SERIES

Schofield, J, Beck, CM and Johnson, WG (eds) (2002) Matériel Culture: The Archaeology of Twentieth Century Conflict, London: Routledge

Wilson, EO (1998) Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, London: Little, Brown and Company

2

The Cold War in context: Archaeological explorations of private, public and political complexity

GRAHAM FAIRCLOUGH

INTRODUCTION: A NEW CONTEXT FOR ARCHAEOLOGY

Not behind us – past in the present

Archaeology is a discipline that invites, and perhaps requires, constant critical review. In particular, review is needed of the assumptions that we make about our relationship with the past and how we use material remains to create present-day perceptions and understanding. This is relatively widely accepted for the study of prehistoric periods and of indigenous cultures, but it is equally true when dealing with apparently familiar and thus seemingly straightforward topics such as the Cold War. Many of the issues raised in this chapter are not exclusive to the Cold War, and are applicable to our contact with any periods of the past, yet they can be argued to be particularly relevant to the archaeology of the Cold War (and other recent conflicts). The Cold War provides a particularly valuable and relevant arena for reflexive analysis. This is partly because its study so readily transcends the disciplinary barriers between archaeologists, historians, anthropologists, artists and writers (among others), but mainly because it is such a recent past.

This chapter, therefore, preceding the more detailed sections of the book, looks critically at some of the assumptions and presumptions that can arise when considering Cold War material remains from a heritage perspective. It began as the outline for a paper that was intended to be delivered at World Archaeological Congress 2003 in Washington DC, but which was not delivered because of a personal decision not to attend so soon after the invasion of Iraq. A modified version was subsequently presented at European Archaeological Association 2003 in St Petersburg, the ‘northern capital’ of a country whose own military conflicts are concealed beneath a cloak of silence. The paper’s ‘prehistory’ is mentioned here simply to show how events in the world even during its preparation seem to have underlined its central thesis: that the closeness of the Cold War to current politics makes this a very problematic area to deal with. The problems can be compounded if too innocent a view is taken of the Cold War legacy, material or otherwise.

Going back further, the stimulus for this chapter came from a peripheral involvement in the Cold War research that English Heritage carried out during the 1990s, leaving this author with anxieties that he could not fully define (and still cannot). The early 1990s had seen a great deal of work on the material legacy of the Second World War, and extending this work into the postwar period was an unproblematic, obvious, natural and necessary step. Both programmes of research took over approaches and methods that had been developed for studying and managing the legacy of more distant periods with their different problems and attributes, a normal process that was seen throughout the 20th century as archaeology moved into new periods (compare with medieval, postmedieval and ‘industrial’ archaeology). For a very recent period still in living memory, still undigested so to speak, such methodological borrowings seem to call for more conscious analysis to reflect some of the period’s unique characteristics: the apparent obviousness of the material remains that seem to need no interpretation, the more than usually extensive survival of ephemeral and transient structures, the scale of survival (and level of condition) generally, the close proximity of the period (with all that implies for detachment or engagement) or the multiplicity of both traditional and new sources of ‘evidence’.

As an introduction to the rest of the book, therefore, this chapter reminds us that while we may think we know all about this recent and still well-remembered period, its interpretation is not so clear-cut. It is far more complex, more questionable and more unknown than we sometimes care to admit. The ‘knowledge’ we think we have can be a minefield for those encountering it, trapping the unwary into simplified or unwarranted interpretation. The things that the botanist Oliver Rackham has called ‘factoids’ – well-accepted assumptions that do not stand many tests but which are often comforting – come to mind, along with his contention that (in his case, within the field of landscape studies) everything is ‘always older than you think’ which is equivalent to acknowledging that material culture is always more complex than we think (just as the fabric of any building of any age will have a more complex story to tell than may be imagined). In the same way, everything in heritage is always more debatable and arguable than you think, and this applies most dramatically to recent, still very freshly contested heritage. The very recent past and its legacy is not merely the latest ‘layer’ but is also the still-forming transition from the past to the future; it differs in kind as well as degree simply by being so recent – it is the ‘contemporary past’, and it is still forming our future by guiding our thoughts about the world. So it is an important study to ‘get right’. Much of what this chapter says may seem self-evident to readers, but it is always worth turning over a few stones to reflect on our starting point.

Coming to terms with a remembered past

The archaeological study of recent periods is worthy of pursuit for its own sake. Archaeology knows no chronological boundaries (although there is a certain unease in moving into this most recent period, since archaeology tends to focus first on military, or at least monumental, hardware). It may also know no geographical boundaries, but there is debate here about intellectual imperialism and whether archaeology is principally a ‘western’ way of looking at the past. This also makes the Cold War a good laboratory because it is often claimed to be one of the few truly global topics. As well as needing study for its own sake, our work on the Cold War has the added advantage of encouraging and facilitating a reflexive approach to the discipline’s principles and methods, and to its ‘taken-for-granteds’. The Cold War raises very strong issues of source criticism, of the relationships between material culture, contemporary documents and living memory (for example), and of accommodating multiple voices. It also acutely raises issues of how far a single past is knowable, or whether we should merely define conflicting views and perspectives. There are difficulties inherent (because of its recent-ness) in doing so, but should we attribute heritage value now rather than in 30 years’ time; and if so, how? Do we choose to privilege some ‘monuments’ over others for passing on to our successors? We like to think that we have inherited a ‘natural’ selection from distant periods of prehistory or the middle ages, whereas we inherit only those sites that are naturally durable (that is, are nonephemeral on some time scale), or those whose value (mundane or spiritual) has continued and ensured survival, or those that were overlooked in marginal, unused areas. The Cold War (and all late 20th-century heritage, a position recently put forward in a manifesto about historic landscape character of the period 1950–2000 called ‘Change and Creation’ – www.changeandcreation.org) opens new lines of questioning, but these can be applied to earlier periods, too: can we choose to be conscious agents of the process of selection and survival? Has past selection been less natural than we think?

A further consideration is that the wealth of data and its proximity to living memory can mislead us into thinking that everything is known, and this trap for the unwary is a major theme of this short essay. It is often said that theory is what archaeologists do when faced with a lack of data; yet theory – the unpacking of assumptions and the transformation of innocence into wisdom, the critical approach to data whether docum...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Cold War, diversity and contemporary archaeology
• Chapter 2 The Cold War in context: Archaeological explorations of private, public and political complexity
• Chapter 3 A paradox of peace: The Hiroshima Peace Memorial (Genbaku Dome) as world heritage
• Chapter 4 Colonialism and the bomb in the Pacific
• Chapter 5 An ideological vacuum: The Cold War in outer space
• Chapter 6 Shaping military women since World War II
• Chapter 7 Defining the national archaeological character of Cold War remains
• Chapter 8 Greenham Common: The conservation and management of a Cold War archetype
• Chapter 9 Out to the waste: Spadeadam and the Cold War
• Chapter 10 Cood bay Forst Zinna
• Chapter 11 The Berlin Wall: Border, fragment, world heritage?
• Chapter 12 Cold War on the domestic front
• Chapter 13 Voices in limbo: a conSPIracy cantata and The Buffer Zone
• Chapter 14 The noise of war, the silence of the photograph
• Chapter 15 Filming the end of the Cold War
• Chapter 16 Reflections on nuclear submarines in the Cold War: Putting military technology in context for a history museum exhibit
• Chapter 17 Archaeology of dissent: Landscape and symbolism at the Nevada Peace Camp
• Index
• About the Contributors