Archaeology at the Crossroads

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I'm generally no fan of "contemporary archaeology", where 20th century sites are investigated and interpreted. If you want to know what those people did, ask them or read the local paper. But Claes Pettersson at the Jönköping County Museum has written a piece in this genre that I actually like a lot. (It's in Swedish.)

In recent decades, the Torsvik highway crossroads has been one of those marginal places on the outskirts of a town that are left over between car dealerships, parking lots and supermarkets. This particular place was also an Iron Age cemetery, and last year the time had come to excavate it for the erection of a home-appliances superstore. Claes and his colleagues made an effort to document signs of recent activity too.

Claes identifies a common theme to the recent finds: semi-illicit activities taking place outside public view. On his excavation plans, he plots smuggled liquor bottles, toiletry sets from the ferries that bring the bottles, dumped garden and construction waste, porn mags, dismantled home electronics, condom wrappers, a dildo, broken locks, and also a lot of toys left behind by kids playing in an exciting secret domain. All at the crossroads, that dangerous place that is nowhere.

This is the first convincing piece of contemporary archaeology I've come across: excavations aiding social anthropology. It tells us something that would have been hard to find out by any other means, as the people who have used the site lately came there clandestinely and would be unwilling to talk about their activities. And that, in my opinion, is where contemporary archaeology can make a valuable contribution. It's the same idea as when 1990s mass graves in Bosnia are excavated to document genocidal crimes. Luckily, no such evidence was found at the Torsvik crossroads.

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Here's another piece inspired by Claes's fine work.

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I always wonder what will be left of our civilisation for the future archaeologists to poke at. CD-roms? Fossilised car engines? Or will anyone care? What do you think?

Wouldn't contemporary archaeology that is backed with extensive data be useful as a guide to interpreting other sites. Look at a modern site blind, look at the data and see what you missed and what you got wrong. It would probably be boring though.

Paddy, how about our highways? The next time you take a drive, check out the way our roads go straight through gravel ridges and small mountains. They will be recognisable and useful at least until the next Ice Age!

Kev, you're right and it's been done a lot. Only you have to find people who live like prehistoric people did. The way I take out the trash doesn't help me understand Stone Age garbage pits, but a few months with bushmen in the Kalahari desert could be informative.

Paddy, those CD-ROMs and DVDs will be unreadable, because the average lifespan of those as storage media is around 5 years. It's depressing to think about what will happen if civilization takes a few centuries' or millenia's hiatus, because all that valuable info they might have had will be gone. Shiny disks, but completely worthless to them.

By Maureen Lycaon (not verified) on 08 Mar 2007 #permalink

I think "contemporary archeology" is a splendid idea, but only as an exercise to an archeology student. Points are to be received of course on the field work, and also on the originality of the interpretation of the findings. This means not parroting what one knows (or one thinks one knows) about, say, the sixties, but getting to an interpretation based on the results!

For that matter, it might be an excellent exercise of any science or non-science student. No risk on "wasting" valuable sites on crappy field work by complete beginners, and very valuable as a science exercise (as outlined above). And maybe it gets more people interested in archeology...

A friend of mine has done digs in the back yard of his kids' Kindergarten with the children. It's in central Stockholm, so they didn't have to dig deep to find ample material of the 18th and 19th centuries: pottery, glass, coins, clay pipes, nails...

But I love your reaction to contemporary archaeology! Imagine telling the editors of Journal of Material Culture that their entire field of research is excellent for training undergrads before they can do real archaeology. (-;

Yeah well, I didn't want to pass the impression that I thought it was really a bad idea... trying to give a positive twist to it ;-)