Unruly Heritage

Archaeologies of the Anthropocene

Bjørnar Julius Olsen, Stein Farstadvoll, Geneviève Godin, Bjørnar Julius Olsen, Stein Farstadvoll, Geneviève Godin

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9781350426368
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350426382
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

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 haunt us; legacies that have become so conspicuously manifest that they are claimed as 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introducing Unruliness: Notes on Heritage in the Anthropocene
• PART I THE MATTER OF UNRULINESS
• 1 An Ethics of the Wild
• 2 Picturing Ghosts
• 3 Artificting Archaeology: Joanna Rajkowska’s Aquarius (2009) and Robert Kuśmirowski’s The Graduation Tower (2014)
• 4 Heritage Lost and Found: Cruel Optimism and Climate Futures
• 5 In Praise of What There Is
• PART II TECHNOLOGY AND ECOLOGICAL BECOMINGS
• 6 The Buick at the End of the World: Nature, Things and the Hidden Legacies of the Century of Automobility
• 7 Things of the Anthropocene: The Unruly Heritage of Coastal Reclamations in Japan
• 8 Between Use and Abandonment: An Archaeology of Mothballing
• 9 Concrete and the Contemporary
• PART III AFTERMATHS AND UNRULY LEGACIES
• 10 Retouching the Bronze Age: Unruly Rock Art
• 11 Managing Scars of Terror in Norway’s Government Quarter and the Shifting Memory Values of VG’s Newspaper Panel
• 12 Unruly Monsters: Submarine Mines in the Baltic Region
• 13 Wayward Ruins: Manifestations of Unruliness in and of a German Second World War Luftwaffe Storage Camp in Pasvik / Paččvei Valley
• Postscript Reflections: Archaeological Imaginations – Unruly Heritage Lessons for the Anthropocene
• Index
• Copyright