Where does archaeology take place
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 07/02/2021

A consideration of where (and when) actions, things and people take place is fundamental to our practice as archaeologists. Place is embedded within our regional and national frameworks, in the management of heritage, and in the structure of the developer-funded archaeology sector. Place permeates our practice – from decisions about stratigraphic context to discussions about heritage-based place-making. The cultural theorist Stuart Hall eloquently problematised the idea of where we consider that history takes place, arguing that there cannot be a history of England without also considering the silences present within that history: ‘I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea […] There is no English history without that other history’ (Hall 1991), and projects such as the Legacies of British Slave-ownership and Colonial Countryside are addressing these entangled histories. Similarly decolonising our archaeological practice will require us to reconsider how we make place in our work, and this paper will explore what this might look like in practice, drawing on work in progress with a group of contemporary objects collected by photographer Gideon Mendel at the site of the Calais ‘Jungle’ camp.

Hall, S. 1991 Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities, in A. King (ed) Culture, Globalization, and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity

 LOUISE FOWLER, MOLA