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Unleash archaeology''s potential by turning toward pasts that resist historical time and reveal the power of an archaeology other than history. History has long shaped our expectations of what the past is and how it should be recalled, written, and displayed. Thus while objects of all ages endure and accumulate around us-often broken and fragmented-we continue to interpret them through historical tropes of completion, succession, and replacement. What if we were to see this indiscriminate persistence and fragmentation not as archaeological defects to be mended by history and historical narration, but as material expressions suggestive of pasts other than history? What might these other pasts look like, and how might we account for them? In this book, Bjornar Olsen and Christopher Witmore pursue these questions. Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork at Svaerholt-an abandoned fishing hamlet, Wehrmacht artillery battery, and prisoner-of-war camp in Arctic Norway-they explore what difference archaeology can make when working with objects routinely saturated by history. Through meticulous material investigations, experimental forms of writing, and striking imagery, the authors open glimpses onto the distinctive pasts that forgotten things remember. In attending to what endures above and below the surface, they also confront central challenges of archaeological thought and interpretation, developing new conceptions of presence, patience, and waiting. The result is a bold and compelling vision of what archaeology might yet become.
About the author
Bjørnar J. Olsen is professor of archaeology at UiT – The Arctic University of Norway. Olsen has long been central to theoretical archaeology though it is in his pioneering work in the new materialisms and contemporary archaeology that he has made his most important contributions. His books include, In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects (Rowman & Littlefield 2010), with Shanks, Webmoor and Witmore, Archaeology: The Discipline of Things (2012), with Pétursdottir (eds), Ruin Memories: Materiality, Aesthetics and the Archaeology of the Recent Past (2014), with Burström, DeSilvey and Þ. Pétursdóttir (eds), After discourse: Things, Affects, Ethics (2021) and with Farstadvoll and Godin (eds), Unruly Heritage: Archaeologies of the Anthropocene (2024, Bloomsbury).Christopher Witmore is President’s Research Professor of archaeology at Texas Tech University. He is known for blending in-depth engagements alongside objects with longstanding and pressing questions of human and nonhuman existence. Witmore is among a few archaeologists who have been instrumental in reorienting archaeology from an exclusive focus on a distant past, to a field of interventions into the present, past, and future. His recent books include Objects Untimely (Polity, 2023), with Graham Harman, and Old Lands. A Chorography of the Eastern Morea, Greece (2020).
