How do you Define Heritage in Fast Moving Fields such as Telecommunications?
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-06-30

Telecommunications has had a transformational impact on society. Whether that is through the development of international communications, the evolution of the telephone into the mobile and onwards to the smartphone, or the Internet and its associated world wide web. However, much of the technology that underpins this revolution lies hidden from public view and therefore tends to be taken for granted. It is also an incredibly fast moving field with an industry that is commercially driven and ruthlessly focused on today and tomorrow with little regard to preserving what happened yesterday.

Using examples such as the BT red phonebox and the rapid replacement of mobile networks, the paper considers the challenge for industrial archaeology: by the time an object is considered important and worthy of preservation, it has often already gone and been replaced with something more modern. How do we as archaeologists become far more agile in terms of recognising significance early enough, adopting more aggressive contemporary collecting policies and having the correct policies in place to enforce preservation?

Nigel Linge (University of Salford) and Andy Sutton (BT)

TAG Deva 2018 
Session: Steaming Plant or Steam Punk? Researching Industrial Archaeology and Heritage in the 21st Century