Object Matters: Archaeology and Heritage in the 21th Century

During the last decades we have witnessed a material twist in the humanities and social sciences: a turn to things. This project is born out of this turn and has three main objectives: 1) to investigate how things remember and may trigger alternative and involuntary memories; 2) to investigate the significance of tacit and affective experiences in our engagement with them, and 3) to critically assess how heritage is being understood and valued today. We have approached the objectives through various case studies and with a contemporary archaeological orientation in mind, which means that we apply archaeological methods to study the recent past and the present. The first cases deal with WW2 archaeology in the north. Crucial here are our investigations at Sværholt in northernmost Norway, where parts of a German coastal battery and a prisoner-of-war camp for Soviet prisoners have been excavated. These investigations have yielded an extensive material that throws new light on the prisoners' everyday life, living conditions, and diet, and also their illegal interference with guards, soldiers and local people. In his PhD research, Ingar Figenschau has conducted investigations of prisoner camps in Nordalen, Troms. These were established after the German retreat from Finnmark and northern Finland late autumn 1944, and the investigations have resulted in a rich material that in a very affective way contributes to alternative recallings of the fate of both soldiers and prisoners at the very end of war. Figenschau also discusses problematic issues concerning how heritage authorities deal with prisoner camps and war heritage more generally. He asks to what extent the strong emphasis in heritage discourses and policy on identity, sustainability, and development makes them appropriate for dealing with this painful heritage and its genuine material manifestations? Material memory and critical conceptions of heritage are also crucial topics in our other case studies. In his recently completed PhD thesis, Stein Farstadvoll undertakes a comprehensive study of the large 19th century landscape garden Reitiro in Molde. Today the garden is left to its own fate and Farstadvoll focusses on how the derelict garden and its unruly flourishing challenge our conception of heritage as ordered, pleasing and confined. He also shows how Retiro's undisciplined afterlife may appear attractive and create niches also for alternative modes of human live. The distinction between culture and nature, and expectations of what heritage is, are also challenged in Þóra Pétursdóttir's postdoctoral research on sea-born debris in the North Atlantic. Her focus is on what happens when things become redundant and escape our intentions and programs of use. As a conspicuous expression of the unruly afterlife of things, beach litter confronts our norms and categories and is also a pungent involuntary memory of the problems we are facing today. In his postdoctoral research, Torgeir Rinke Bangstad looks closer at the process of ?promoting? things to official cultural heritage. More specifically, he has studied the process of moving and conserving an abandoned house from Finnmark to be exhibited at Norsk Folkemuseum in Oslo. The house was built as part of the extensive state-run Post-WW II rebuilding program, and Bangstad focusses on the intersections on frictions between the museum's exhibition norms and the house's own material recalling of its dynamic life. One such friction is that the house is restored to its presumed original form where later amendments and modernizations are erased. The last case study deals with Soviet heritage in the Russian North. Despite the fall of the Soviet state in 1991, the regime's material presence is still conspicuous in practically all places. One of them is Teriberka, a small town east of Murmansk. Nearly all buildings and infrastructure date to the Stalin and Khrushchev era, and today the town is heavily affected by abandonment and decay. Our research has focussed on documenting this ruining heritage and explore the consequences of living with it. How does it affect memories, everyday life, and prospects for the future? One conclusion is that it creates different and partly conflicting conceptions of past and presence. While the Soviet material legacy for some, though in different and often ambiguous ways, connects to past when 'everything was good', others find it a thick and sticky heritage that impacts on every attempt to move on. On a more general level this project exemplifies the significance of an archaeological understanding of the past. In contrast to a conventional historical conception where the past is seen as completed and gone, the emphasis here is on its material duration. Things are persistent, they have an inherent 'slowness' that literally objects the pace of history. Such a material understanding offers a very different perspective on memory and how the past affects us, for good or bad.

VIRKNINGER Fire rekrutteringsstillinger inngikk i prosjektet, to av dem finansiert av UiT som en premiering av vår innsats. Den ene stipendiatene har disputert, den andre leverer sin avhandling i oktober 2019. En av våre postdoktorer har fått fast forskerstilling ved UiO, den andre er forsker topp-forsk prosjektet Unruly Heritage. En særdeles viktig virking av Object Matters-prosjektet var vår forskningsgruppe ved Senter for grunnforskning i 2016-17. Denne var grunnleggende basert på prosjektet problemstillinger, og gjorde det mulig for oss å samarbeide ett år med noen av verdens fremste forskere på feltet. Det la også grunnlag for byggingen av et tett internasjonalt nettverk som videreutvikles i dag. Object Matters-prosjektet bidratt avgjørende til det teoretiske ordskiftet internasjonalt om ting, erindring, og kulturarv. EFFEKTER De perspektiver vi har forsket på i økende grad også blir gjort relevante innenfor kulturarvspolitikk og miljø- og kulturminneforvaltning.

OBJECT MATTERS: ARKEOLOGI OG KULTURARV I DET 21. ÅRHUNDRE Tingene er tilbake. Etter et århundres glemsel, og etter ti-år med tekstuelle og språklige vendinger, snakkes det nå om en radikal snuoperasjon i kultur- og samfunnsvitenskapene: en vending mot tingene. Dette prosjektet er et eksplisitt og kritisk forsøk på studere denne tinglige vendingen og undersøker dens konsekvenser for to tradisjonelt gjenstandsorienterte fagfelt, arkeologi og kulturarvsstudier. Samtidig som vi både anerkjenner og drar veksler på de viktige bidrag til tingforskningen som i den seinere tid er kommet fra filosofer, kunstforskere, sosiologer, geografer, antropologer og andre, skiller vår tilnærming seg ved i større grad å ta utgangspunkt i - og ha tiltro til - tingene selv i deres skiftende og konkrete manifestasjoner. Vårt utgangspunkt er at en virkelig (tilbake)vending til tingene ikke kan skje gjennom teoretiske og begrepsmessige vurderinger alene, men også må baseres i erfaringer som er forankret i en direkte omgang med tingene selv. Med basis i samtidsarkeologiske studier av moderne ruinlandskap i Finnmark og NV-Russland, vil prosjektet fokusere på tre hovedtema: 1) materielt minne: å undersøke hvordan ting i deres bestandighet og forfall åpner for alternative og ufrivillige former for erindring, 2) tingenes sanselighet: å utforske betydningen av de tause og sanselige erfaringene som skapes gjennom den umiddelbare omgangen med tingene; 3) tingenes etikk: å kritisk vurdere grunnlaget for kulturminnenes verdisetting i dagens kulturarvspolitikk og undersøke mulige konsekvenser av en etikk utvidet til også å omfatte ting. Gjennom å sette fokus på tingene selv er det vårt mål å utvikle et nytt grunnlag for diskusjon av arkeologi og kulturarv i det 21. århundre