John Schofield

The queer archaeology of Green Gate: interpreting contested space at Greenham Common Airbase

This paper uses a well-known twentieth-century monument to examine contradictions in the material record and how they might be accommodated in protection and interpretative schemes at this and similar sites where contested space is represented. The archaeology of the later twentieth century at, and immediately outside, Greenham Common Airbase (Berkshire, England) is described as unconventional and atypical in its associations, mysterious and disquieting in its later Cold War context, as well as outlandish and unorthodox in what it can hope to achieve in terms of public perception and interpretation. Protest is the stuff of everyday life, yet it is rarely and barely recognised in heritage interpretation, particularly where opposition was directly aimed at the establishment view or government policy. This paper explores these related issues.

The filth and the fury: 6 Denmark Street (London) and the Sex Pistols

In case readers are wondering whether this paper is written tongue in cheek — or with tongue sticking out — it is worth recalling that modern archaeology includes recent periods in its remit, and uses recent materiality to help understand more ancient times as well as a critique on modernity itself. Here the authors find graffiti left by a notorious group of popular musicians and probe it for social meaning as earnestly as students of cave art. Their archaeological study finds an underlying driver that is part political, part personal and therefore also part (anti-)heritage.

Turbo Island, Bristol: excavating a contemporary homeless place

Abstract This paper provides an assessment of the excavation of an apparently ordinary space in Bristol (UK) in 2009. Although the space appears unremarkable to most passers-by, it is unusual in being a place used routinely by many of the city’s street-drinking and homeless community. Homeless people were ‘colleagues’, involved in excavation, finds processing and interpretation. The collaborative nature of this project goes further than merely attempting to represent social groups who have traditionally been excluded from heritage practice and interpretation — it lays methodological foundations for praxis. Abstract Turbo Island, Bristol: fouiller un lieu contemporain pour les sans abris Cet article traite des données relatives à la fouille archéologique, menée en 2009 à Bristol (GB), d’un lieu apparemment ordinaire. Bien que l’espace semble quelconque pour la plupart des passants, sa fréquentation par de nombreux sans-abris et par des ivrognes en font un lieu peu commun. Au cours de cette fouille, les sans-abris sont devenus des «collègues», impliqués dans le dégagement, le traitement des découvertes et leur interprétation. La nature collaborative de ce projet va plus loin qu’une simple tentative de représenter les groupes sociaux qui ont traditionnellement été exclus de la pratique et de l’interprétation du patrimoine, cette étude permet en effet de poser des bases méthodologiques pour la praxis. Abstract Turbo Insel, Bristol: Ausgrabungen eines Platzes für gegenwärtig Heimatlose Dieser Artikel untersucht die Ausgrabungen eines scheinbar gewöhnlichen Platzes in Bristol (UK) in 2009. Obwohl der Platz Vorübergehenden nicht weiter bemerkenswert erscheint, ist er ungewöhnlich, weil er routinemäßig von vielen städtischen Straßentrinkern und Heimatlosen genutzt wird. Heimatlose wurden zu “Kollegen”, denn sie halfen bei den Ausgrabungen, bei der Säuberung und Einordnung der Funde und Interpretation. Die Zusammenarbeit in diesem Projekt führte weiter als nur eine soziale Gruppe einzubeziehen, die traditionellerweise aus dem Prozess des Kulturerbes und dessen Interpretation ausgeschlossen ist – es legte methodologische Fundamente für die Praxis. Abstract Turbo Island, Bristol: scavo di un luogo per senza tetto di epoca contemporanea Questo saggio fornisce una valutazione sullo scavo di uno spazio apparentemente ordinario a Bristol (UK) effettuato nel 2009. Sebbene questo spazio sembri anonimo alla maggior parte dei passanti, è insolito per essere un luogo utilizzato abitualmente da una parte della comunità cittadina dei senza fissa dimora e dalle persone che bevono in strada. I senza-tetto sono stati coinvolti come “colleghi” nello scavo e nelle fasi di studio e interpretazione dei reperti. La natura collaborativa di questo progetto va oltre il mero tentativo di rappresentare gruppi sociali che sono stati tradizionalmente esclusi dall’interpretazione e dalla valorizzazione del patrimonio, gettando le basi metodologiche per una prassi. Abstract Isla de Turbo, Bristol: excavación de un lugar desahuciado contemporáneo Este artículo presenta los resultados de la excavación de un espacio aparentemente ordinario en Bristol (Reino Unido) en 2009. Aunque el espacio aparenta ser normal para la mayoría de los transeúntes, el lugar es utilizado habitualmente por muchos de los habitantes de la ciudad que se dedican a beber en las calles y también por vagabundos. Muchos de ellos participaron en la excavación, en el procesado de los hallazgos y ene la interpretación. La naturaleza colaborativa de este proyecto va más allá de intentar simplemente representar a los grupos sociales que tradicionalmente han sido excluidos de la interpretación y de la práctica de patrimonio, ya que establece bases metodológicas para su praxis.

Archaeology in the City of London: Archive and Publication

This note describes the archive and publication framework which has been developed to make accessible the results of archaeological excavations and related research in the City of London, especially since 1973. Appended to it, in microfiche form, is a bibliography of reports now available (M3/01—M3/68).

D-Day sites in England : an assessment

Between midnight on 6 June (D-Day) and 30 June 1944, over 850,000 men landed on the invasion beachheads of Normandy, together with nearly 150,000 vehicles and 570,000 tons ofsupplies. Assembled in camps and transit areas over the preceding months, this force was dispatched from a string of sites along Britains coastline between East Anglia and South Wales (Dobinson 1996: 2). The article reviews those sites in England involved in this embarkation. English Heritages Monuments Protection Programme (MPP) aims to identify surviving sites and recommend appropriate protection for them.

The Ethics of Cultural Heritage

Debates about the ethics of cultural heritage in the twentieth century were focused on the need to establish standards of professionalism and on the development of the skills and expertise required for rigorously objective conservation. The ethics of cultural heritage have often been conceived of in terms of three types of responsibilities: to the ‘archaeological record’ (or stewardship), to ‘diverse publics’ (or stakeholders) and to the profession and the discipline. This volume builds on recent approaches that move away from treating ethics as responsibilities to external domains and to the discipline and which seek to realign ethics with discussions of theory, practice and methods. The chapters in this collection chart a departure from the tradition of external heritage ethics, to a broader approach underpinned by the turn to human rights, issues of social justice and the political economy of heritage, conceptualising ethical responsibilities not as pertaining to the past but to a future-focused domain of social action.

Discordant landscapes: Managing modern heritage at Twyford Down, Hampshire (England)

This essay goes to the heart of many of the accepted notions that inform heritage practice and theory: of the permanence of monuments; their legitimisation by age; their preservation from change; and their representation of a social consensus. By contrast, modern ‘intrusions’ to lived space are designed to be impermanent, are obviously new, represent change and often result from conflict. Twyford Down (Hampshire) is an example—a concrete expression—of this discordance: it has legal protection, but was compromised by the construction of the M3 motorway extension in the late 1980s. Yet, with archaeologists increasingly willing to explore the contemporary past, can sites like Twyford Down not be interpreted in a very different way, by recognising the landscape as dynamic not static, and by understanding that the process of change is as relevant today as it was in the past? In this essay such a post‐modern interpretation of landscape and heritage‐management practice is suggested, placing Twyford Down’s later 20th‐century components alongside those of an earlier date. It is difficult to give such contemporary places the official recognition they deserve.

Beyond biomedicine: traditional medicine as cultural heritage

Over the past decade, intangible cultural heritage (hereafter, ICH), the significance which it possesses and the continuation of its myriad manifestations have reached unprecedented levels of recognition and attention on international and national policy agendas. Traditional Medicine (hereafter, TM) has long been included under the vast umbrella of ICH, yet there have been few attempts to explore that relationship. This paper examines the practical implications of applying the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Heritage to TM, alongside the relationship of traditional medicine to the fields of human rights, public health and development. It considers, and reaches the conclusion that the cultural significance of traditional medicine combined with the fundamental principles of the Convention render the Convention significant in safeguarding traditional medicine for the future.

The archaeology of sound and music

Until comparatively recently the archaeology of sound and music was confined largely to physical evidence: the instruments which people blew, plucked or hit to create sounds and – one assumes – music. Volume 12(3) of World Archaeology comprised a set of papers on the subject ‘Archaeology and Musical Instruments’. More searching questions seemed to lie beyond the reach of archaeology, outside the limits of archaeology’s scientific rigour: in what situations was music played in the past? Did the footprints in clay within Palaeolithic caves indicate some kind of performance in which music was instrumental (so to speak)? Was our modern conception of ‘noise’ (in the sense of unwelcome sound) also evident in the past? What did the Viking town, the medieval city, the workhouse and the hillfort actually sound like? Did the landscape then sound much the same as the landscape today? But archaeology’s reach has extended in recent years. Studies of instruments remain a significant part of the agenda and are well represented in this collection. But developments in other fields make additional insight possible: the suitability of spaces for particular types of sound, whether buildings, rock shelters or the wider landscape; the relevance of archaeologies of the contemporary past, not just for experimentation and hypothesis testing, but as a documentation of the contemporary world – an archaeological record where other sources are lacking. This collection contains a diversity of examples, from the Palaeolithic to the present, from the Near East and South America to Europe and the USA. It raises a number of questions which archaeology, in partnership with researchers from other disciplines, appears uniquely placed to address, combining under the single big question: what did the past actually sound like? This collection therefore encapsulates the modern discipline of archaeology. As with the previous ‘musical instruments’ volume, materiality remains central, through artefacts and places used and occupied in the past, and the wider physical, cultural and social landscape of which they are a part. It also incorporates key theoretical considerations such as performativity and phenomenology; it makes close reference to physics and biology – the ways in which sound is made and travels, and the capacity of humans to hear it; and music technology in the various ways past conditions can be recreated. Finally there is ethnography, and there is heritage, the things that survive and what they mean to contemporary society. Overall, the twelve papers included here fall into three broad categories:

The cultural landscape and heritage paradox: protection and development of the Dutch archaeological-historical landscape and its European dimension

The widening scope of landscape and heritage research includes the ‘ordinary’ landscapes. It is also recognised that heritage management is increasingly the ‘management of future change rather than simply protection’. This presents us with a paradox: to know and preserve our historic environment we have to collaborate with those who wish to transform it and in order to apply our expert knowledge we have to make it suitable for policy and society. (p. 673)