Scaling Ideological Time
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-02-08

‘If different processes and phenomena become apparent at different scales of observation, there can be no single unified history…only a multi-scalar [one] written from many different points of view.’ Presenting a nuanced narrative that resolves such ontological divides is often the task of heritage practitioners – but what happens when public practice overrides all offerings from empirical observation? When emergent waves of tangible data and expert opinion are deliberately rejected in the resilient maintenance of an ideological appropriation of place and time? This paper comments on just such a dilemma, using the Welsh Government initiative ‘Year of Legends’ (http://gov.wales/newsroom/culture-tourism-sport/2017/170301-year-of-legends-2017/?lang=en) as a case study, where local identity has been founded upon a reuse of the ‘past within the past’ and socially situated memory is reliant upon an active process of forgetting. 

Erin Kavanagh (University of Wales Trinity St David)