Håkan Karlsson

Memories of a world crisis : The archaeology of a former Soviet nuclear missile site in Cuba.

Santa Cruz de los Pinos is a small town like most others in the Cuban countryside. But half a century ago it was the epicenter of the 1962 Missile Crisis. During that time it served as a Soviet base for middle-range nuclear missiles, and the US air reconnaissance photos of it were spread through media all around the world. The crisis was solved through negotiations without Cuban involvement, and as a result of this neglect the Missile Crisis has been an under-communicated part of history in Cuba. A Swedish—Cuban research project has now investigated what kinds of memories of the crisis remain today at the former missile base — in the ground as well as in people’s minds. Digging in the ground has proved to be an effective way to start a remembering process and to help disarm a politically loaded history and uncover stories other than those dominating ‘big history’.

Places of Power: Control, Public Access and Authenticity at Rock Carvings in Tanum, Sweden and Val Camonica, Italy

Abstract This article presents a critical and ethnographically directed discussion and comparison of how the World Heritage listed rock carvings at Tanum, Sweden and Val Camonica, Italy are managed and made accessible to the public. The article focuses on how the Swedish and Italian heritage management cultures view the rock carvings as an authentic (i.e. genuine) phenomenon firmly, and solely, belonging to the past and how this contemporary embedded and constructed narrative leads to specific ways of managing, constructing, organizing, presenting, and staging these places for the public. The article stresses that even if the rock carvings were produced in the past, their authenticity is also a product of their role in contemporary negotiations of interpretive supremacy, control, and power between the culture of heritage management and the public. An ethnographical approach, and ethnographical methods, are used. This approach has implications for archaeology and its public relations; in the light of it, activities and phenomena that seem to be completely normal are revealed as examples of the specific culture of contemporary archaeology and heritage management. It is stressed that this culture and its rituals need to be further examined from an ethnographic point of departure.

A New Ethical Path for Archaeology

goodwill, but each group has to interpret acts of goodwill as benevolent (ColwellChanthaphonh and Ferguson (2006, p. 127). If we wish to develop trust among archaeologists and museums and indigenous groups, all parties must move to a focus on people and actions over time, rather than things and single interactions at one time. Svestad has done an excellent job outlining some of the major ethical and theoretical issues involved in what might initially seem to be a straightforward repatriation. He cites Masterton (2010) and others as promoting the ‘interests of the dead’, the idea that the dead should be recognized as moral persons in their own right. Even in his application ofHeidegger to these issues, Svestad suggests that there are important individual issues that need to be discovered or disclosed.While his arguments have intellectual merit, they are of an entirely different nature than the concerns and ethics and politics of the people requesting repatriation. Cultures change over time, and there is not a single right or correct path towards repatriation. Maybe in a world without politics, one could argue for the interests of the specific dead, but that world has really never existed, and mortuary practices are really for the living and not the dead. In his discussion of the various aspects of the Neiden reburial, Svestad makes it clear that he understands the range and variability of the ethical issues involved. He is particularly concerned with being mindful towards the dead and their belongings. While, at least at this stage in archaeological history, it may not be possible to achieve his goals, he is correct that we might all be better served if everyone fully understood the entirety of situations and avoided ‘distortedness, concealment and carelessness’. That goal may be sometime in the future, and we first have to learn mutual respect and trust. REFERENCES

Richard M. Hutchings: Maritime heritage in crisis. Indigenous landscapes and global ecologic breakdown. Routledge, London, 2017, 144 pp., ISBN 978-1-62958-348-8

different ways of production, suggesting the treatment was the defining factor, not the composition of the material. Next, the concept of ‘special deposition’. Does it imply a not-so-special counterpart? The non-valuables? This is where it gets tricky. Or interesting. All depositions are interesting to study, as is what we categorise as waste, and not only depositions of waste after a meal eaten at a feast or gathering. Where we draw the line between special and not-sospecial deposits, and what we think this signifies has been discussed at least since the 1980s (for example, the concept of ‘structured deposition’ in Richards and Thomas 1984) and has received renewed attention recently (see Garrow 2012 with comments). Bradley does not discuss this issue in detail here, but has done so previously (Bradley 2003, 2005). It would have been interesting if he had included more of the many not-so-special depositions in the discussion, as he would probably have something interesting to say about them. They are also in renewed focus, for example in a recent dissertation with over 200 such sites dated to the Early Iron Age in Denmark (Johannesen 2017). They need to be included if we are to understand this phenomenon of depositions. To conclude, this is an interesting contribution to the discussion of deposited materials, and its strength lies in the wide scope, both chronologically and geographically, which facilitates insights that are not visible in period-specific discussions. Being meant as an essay, the book raises questions, but it also gives some answers and draws new conclusions. I enjoyed reading it and will henceforth view 18thcentury still lives with new eyes (in the book used as an analogy to archaeological hoards).

Memory and post-war memorials. Confronting the violence of the past

Arriving back to my office after a meeting with Syrian colleagues concerning the present conditions for heritage and heritage management in the country, and after discussing the possible post-war situation, and how to reconstruct and/or commemorate massacres and vanished buildings, I did find Marc Silberman’s and Florance Vatan’s book on my desk. With the discussions concerning present and post-war Syria still ringing in my ears, I started reading. Syria is just one terrible example, since during the whole twentieth century humanity experienced, amongst others; wars, genocides, ethnic cleansing, forced population expulsions, shifting boarders and totalitarian regimes. One can easily conclude that the last century was a period filled with different forms of violence and terror, and this interesting and important book focuses on the functions of memory, the politics of commemoration practices, and the ethics of healing in traumatic post-conflict scenarios. As Marc Silberman stresses in his contribution;

A Valuable Latin American Contribution to Conflict and Battlefield Archaeology

In the last shivering days of 2014, a year that has witnessed amongst others the commemoration of the beginning of the WWI, I received the interesting new book Sobre Campos de Batalla: Arqueología de Conflictos Bélicos en América Latina (About Battlefields: Archaeology and Conflicts of War in Latin America). This book is, for a number of reasons, a most welcome and thought-provoking contribution to the research field of historical archaeology and to an archaeology directed at conflicts and battlefields. This is not least because it clearly shows how the study of conflicts and historic battlefields has developed rapidly and in very interesting directions in Latin America during the last decade. This has probably been unnoticed by the majority of archaeologists in Europe, irrespective of whether they are interested in this field of research or not. In the contemporary European research context, conflict and battlefield archaeology are quite well established and there are both journals and conferences devoted to the scholarly exchange of ideas and results (cf. Schofield, Klausmeier and Purbrick 2006; Pollard and Banks 2008; Journal of Conflict Archaeology). This also goes, at least partly, hand-in-hand with the development of the research field of contemporary archaeology and approaches that focus on the material culture of military installations, etc. (cf. Holtorf and Piccini, 2009; Olsen and Pétursdóttir, 2014). The book starts with an introduction by its authors Carlos Landa and Odlanyer Hernández de Lara (University of Luján, Argentina), and it is followed by a prologue by Tony Pollard (University of Glasgow, Scotland), and a presentation of the book by Mariano Ramos (University of Luján, Argentina). It is arranged in seven chapters and each chapter presents the reader with an interesting case study about the investigations of specific battlefields. These span the period between 1541 and 1898, even if the main focus is on the twentieth century, and they are located in different parts of Latin America; to be more precise, in Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, and Uruguay. The contributors to the case studies in the book, comprising thirty-seven scholars, approach this field of historical archaeological research from a number of different directions, covering amongst other topics general reflections of theory and method; questions concerning the preservation of battlefields and its material culture as cultural heritage; and practical methodological and conservation questions. The contributions have in common that all of them in a convincing manner show that historical archaeology and its multi-disciplinary investigations and results — which combine the theoretical and methodological approaches from disciplines such as history, anthropology, sociology and archaeology — has a lot to offer and to add, as a complement to written and oral sources, not least when it comes to the study of conflicts and historic battlefields. Within the framework of the multidisciplinary approach used, archaeology, its practical field investigations, and its focus on material culture may, for