Sheila Watson

‘Why can’t we dig like they do on Time Team?’ The meaning of the past within working class communities

This paper describes the community excavation organised by Great Yarmouth Museums in Norfolk, England in 2001. It resulted from a period of consultation with a wide range of community representatives within the Borough during the development of the Borough’s Heritage Strategy. In 2000, the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions published a review of the Indices of Deprivation, Great Yarmouth ranked fifth-worst in ward level intensity out of 354 local authority districts in England, and the excavation took place in the heart of the most deprived area of the town. Consultation showed that those who lived in this area had a strong interest in the past beyond memory and were keen to find out more about it. Above all, they wanted to take part in an excavation and put the objects they found in a new museum. The paper explores common preconceptions of working class attitudes to archaeology and heritage and considers how far these were borne out by work with deprived communities in Great Yarmouth.

The legacy of communism – difficult histories, emotions and contested narratives

Abstract This paper considers contested and traumatic narratives, using a case study of the planned National Museum of Romanian Communism and the site of Jilava Penitentiary, a former communist prison, near Bucharest in Romania. It discusses what happened when representatives from different groups of former victims and perpetrators met together with facilitators and worked towards a shared understanding of the past to reach some consensus about how to deal with different and apparently conflicting narratives within a new museum of communism. It draws on notions of emotional communities in order to understand the role heritage plays in contested situations. It also considers the nature of transitional justice (‘Transitional justice is an approach to systematic or massive violations of human rights that both provides redress to victims and creates or enhances opportunities for the transformation of the political systems, conflicts, and other conditions that may have been at the root of the abuses’.) in this context.

Community archives: the shaping of memory

edited by Jeannette A. Bastian and Ben Alexander, London, Facet Publishing, 2009, 286 pp., £49.95 (hardback), ISBN 978‐1‐85604‐639‐8. This thought‐provoking collection of 13 essays with an introduc...