Archaeology of Utopia: The future and legacy of a 19th century socialist community at Manea Fen
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-03-04

It is a defining and constitutive feature of the human condition to measure the standards of life against the possibility of their improvement in the future. In the 19th century various grand experiments were attempted to establish new and alternative foundations for humanity’s course to a future of equitable social harmony. Archaeology may examine how, through their different strategies, these projects envisaged their own form of Utopia as an outcome of a combination of particular material environments and sound moral conviction. Supported by a Lottery-funded case study of recent fieldwork on the site of a mid-19th-century Utopian colony in the remote Cambridgeshire fenland, the agency of anticipated futures – and their material legacy – on subsequent generations of inhabitants may be judged against the documentation of their historical outcome.  

Marcus Brittain (Cambridge Archaeological Unit)