I have just received a copy of World Crisis in Ruin; the Archaeology of the Former Soviet Missile Sites in Cuba from Mats Burström, Anders Gustafsson and Håkan Karlsson.

Another fascinating archaeology of the contemporary past.

The 1962 Missile Crisis is a well-known episode in the Cold War and twentieth-century history. It is documented in a variety of sourrces, and it has been the subject of extensive historical research. But what remains today of the missile sites that once were a focus of world interest? What does a World Crisis in ruin look like? In order to find new ways of looking at the Crisis we conducted archaeological fieldwork, looking for memories in the ground as well as in people’s minds. The pictorial results of our efforts are presented in this book.

Related is Persistent Memories by Elin Andreasssen, Hein B. Bjerck, and Bjørnar Olsen – extraordinary and haunting archaeological fieldwork in the abandoned Soviet mining town of Pyramiden on Svalbard:

I have been waiting for it to happen.

I take photos of the textures of everyday life.

Everyday life is under challenge. Ireland is on the brink of ruin. “We are back to the old three ‘Ps’ Michael”, someone says to me – “Pints, Ponies … and I can’t remember the third” … Heritage comes back to haunt the Tiger Celtic economy, now no more.

I am in Dublin in an old bar, somewhat twee and conservative, but definitively Dublin.

I take a photograph and a couple complain. Not to me, they are sitting next to me, but to “The Management”. The photo is not of them, but they object to an invasion of “privacy” – in this public space. And I had not yet presented them with the release form securing my right to publish the picture (irony – this is a deeply personal visual note, a memory never intended for distribution).

Worlds breaking apart.

Perhaps appropriately.

OK – here it is.

Though overly restored in the nineteenth century, the church of St Cuthbert at Norham on the Tweed still has some of the sumptuousness that originates in its original foundation by the bishops of Durham (Durham Cathedral houses the bones and grave of Cuthbert, and Norhamshire was not part of the border county of Northumberland, but of the County Palatine of Durham). The south arcade and chancel of c1170 remain.

It was on this exact spot in May 1290 that Edward Longshanks, King of England, declared he was come in the character of supreme and direct lord (Arthur’s heir), to maintain the tranquility of Scotland in its disputes over the succession, and to mete impartial justice to the numerous claimants of its crown.

There followed three centuries of border conflict.

Exploring the Borders with Gary (Devore).

Jedburgh Abbey – an extraordinary building.

In the footsteps of Roloph Beny – remarkable photographer, remarkable and misguided snob.

Here is his photo from the lavish Thames and Hudson edition of Rose Macualay’s “Pleasure of Ruins” (1962).

Flickr galleries – [Link] [Link]

Here are some notes accompanying the fascinating and sometimes wonderful pictures.

Nostalgic, Personal, Neglected, Treasured, Rejected: The Other Photography in Archaeology
Colleen Morgan, University of California, Berkeley, clmorgan@berkeley.edu
Our record of archaeological uncertainty is becoming dazzlingly clear; professional-quality digital SLR cameras producing high-dynamic range imaging are becoming the norm on archaeological projects and our photographic archives, once highly-curated collections of “scientific,” carefully set-up shots, have exploded in size and diversified in content accordingly. Along with this extraordinary, high-tech verisimilitude runs a counter-narrative—photography on sites performed by students, workmen, professionals, and tourists using their cellphones. In a session focused on exploring the work that archaeological photography does, I will investigate the hazy, inaccurate, personal, and extra-archival qualities of the archaeological snapshot.

Tintype Portraits – Objects of Self-Imagination
Heather Law, University of California, Berkeley, heather.law@berkeley.edu
For this session I’ll be presenting an assemblage of late 19th and early 20th century tintypes in order to initiate a discussion of the role of portraits as both objects employed in the construction of self, and as artifacts that might contribute to conversations of materiality and personhood in archaeological contexts. The tintype, as the first affordable form of portraiture available to middle class Americans, has the potential to illustrate diverse processes of self imagination made possible by the novelty of photographs as objects of self representation.

Topographic – Photographic: Dialogues with the Recent Past
Thóra Pétursdóttir, University of Tromsoe, thora.petursdottir@uit.no
Photography’s contribution to archaeology is unquestioned. However, its importance in terms of both documentation and representation notwithstanding , it largely holds a secondary value in archaeological discourses. The role of images is to be subservient to the text, to “illustrate” and support, and more active, experimental and “artistic” uses are often dismissed as subjective and unscientific. Using examples from my research on modern Icelandic ruins, I will challenge this hierarchy and show how photography enables alternative and genuine statements about the past and provides a means to make manifest the heterogeneous and ineffable that often is left out of scientific prose.

History Making and Memory Keeping: Photographs as Artifacts of Black Family History
Annelise Morris, University of California, Berkeley, aemorris@berkeley.edu
Founded in the late 18th century by free black pioneers and occupied continuously ever since, my family’s ancestral homestead is also the archaeological site I will begin excavating for my dissertation. With generations of family portraits and photographs available, I’m interested in exploring how photographs are used to create site histories and, similarly, their role in the memorialization of the black experience. For this session, I’ll present a sample of these photographic artifacts discussing their unique visual access to lived experiences of an archaeological site, as well as their ability to represent changing articulations of the self and the family.

More recognition that archaeology is always of the present – because we work not upon the past, but upon what remains.

See also – archaeography.com and archaeographer.com

Jeff Dexter. Rocking C’s Ranch, Montana. Cattle country. Looking for Cooler Cave: full of bison bones.

Petroglyph. Dry Range, Rocking C’s.

My first visit to this vast landscape of the American sublime.

Faint and evocative traces of the Native American past everywhere.

Some years ago Sam (Schillace) put me onto a Russian photographer, Sergey Larenkov, who combines old and new photographs of Leningrad/St Petersburg, then – WWII, and now.

They have haunted me ever since.

It’s not difficult to find the photos on the web; it only took me a few moments to find them again – [Link]

“Then and now” “This happened here” – an aspect of the archaeological imagination.

(James Cameron did something similar with Ghosts of the Abyss – Titanic “then and now”)

Deniseburna near Hefenfelth on Hadrian’s Wall. 633 or 634. Oswald of Bernicia met and defeated in battle Cadwallon ap Cadfan of Gwynedd.

(Polaroid transfer)

Molly and Emma.

Site of several scenes in “The Sandpiper” – Vincente Minnelli 1965 – [Link]

Ben and Josephine

Winter’s Gibbet, Elsdon, Northumberland.