Research Catalog

Title

Ruin memories : materiality, aesthetics and the archaeology of the recent past / edited by Bjørnar Olsen and Þóra Pétursdóttir.

Publication

London ; New York : Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2014.

Supplementary Content

Cover image

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

• Olsen, Bjørnar
• Þóra Pétursdóttir, 1978-

Description

xviii, 492 pages : illustrations, maps; 26 cm

Summary

"Since the 19th century, mass-production, consumerism and cycles of material replacement have accelerated; increasingly larger amounts of things are increasingly rapidly victimized and made redundant. At the same time processes of destruction have immensely intensified, although largely overlooked when compared to the research and social significance devoted to consumption and production. The outcome is a ruin landscape of derelict factories, closed shopping malls, overgrown bunkers and redundant mining towns; a ghostly world of decaying modern debris normally left out of academic concerns and conventional histories. The archaeology of the recent or contemporary past has grown fast during the last decade. This development has been concurrent with a broader popular, artistic and scholarly interest in modern ruins in general. Ruin Memories explores how the ruins of modernity are conceived and assigned cultural value in contemporary academic and public discourses, reassesses the cultural and historical value of modern ruins and suggests possible means for reaffirming their cultural and historic significance. Crucial for this reassessment is a concern with decay and ruination, and with the role things play in expressing the neglected, unsuccessful and ineffable. Abandonment and ruination is usually understood negatively through the tropes of loss and deprivation; things are degraded and humiliated while the information, knowledge and memory embedded in them become lost along the way. Without at all ignoring its many negative and traumatizing aspects, a main question addressed in this book is whether ruination also can be seen as an act of disclosure? If ruination disturbs the routinized and ready-to-hand, to what extent can it also be seen as a recovery of memory as exposing meanings and presences that perhaps are only possible to grasp at second hand when no longer immersed in their withdrawn and useful reality? Anybody interested in the archaeology of the contemporary past will find Ruin Memories an essential guide to the very latest theoretical research in this emerging field of archaeological thought"--

Series Statement

Archaeological orientations

Uniform Title

Archaeological orientations.

Subjects

• Memory > Social aspects
• History, Modern
• Abandoned buildings
• Aesthetics, Modern
• Landscape archaeology
• Archaeology > Research
• Archaeology and history
• Social archaeology
• Historic sites
• Material culture

Note

• "Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada"--Title page verso.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Introduction. An archaeology of ruins / Þóra Pétursdóttir and Bjørnar Olsen -- Things, ethics and heritage. Trusted vagueness: the language of things and the order of incompleteness / Dag T. Andersson -- Ethics and flesh: being touched by the otherness of things / Luca D. Introna -- The ontology of absence: uniting materialist and ecological interpretations at an abandoned open-pit copper mine / Timothy J. LeCain -- Palliative curation: art and entropy on Orford Ness / Caitlin DeSilvey -- Industrial heritage and the ideal of presence / Torgeir R. Bangstad -- Material memory. My father's things / Hein B. Bjerck -- In ruins old and new: cultivating threat on a former hacienda, Yucatán / Jason Ramsey -- Treasured memories: an anecdotal mapping of wartime caches in Estonia / Mats Burström -- Sværholt: recovered memories from a POW camp in the far north / Bjønar Olsen and Christopher Witmore -- Ruins, art, attraction. The affordances and potentialities of derelict urban spaces / Joanne Hudson -- Which ruins do we valorize? a visual calibration curve for the Balkan past / Douglass Bailey -- Children in ruins: bombsites as playgrounds in Second World War Britain / Gabriel Moshenska -- Silent power #1: Trondheim Harbour, Norway 2012 / Elin Andreassen -- Invented revelation / Aðalsteinn Ásberg Sigurðsson and Nökkvi Elíasson -- Abandonment. No man's land: the ontology of a space left over / Dag T. Andersson -- Conduits of dispersal: dematerializing an early twentieth-century village in Iceland / Gavin Lucas -- Manifestations of conflict in a post-ceasefire state: material, memory and meaning in contemporary Northern Ireland / Laura McAtackney -- Things out-of-hand: the aesthetics of abandonment / Þóra Pétursdóttir -- Archaeologies of the recent past. Returning to where we have never been: excavating the ruins of modernity / Alfredo González-Ruibal -- Borders in ruin / Anna McWilliams -- Ruins of the weather war: studying the material remains of Allied and Wehrmacht activities in Northeast Greenland / Jens F. Jensen and Tilo Krause -- Materialising Skatås--archaeology of a Second World War refugee camp in Sweden / Maria Persson -- Object-oriented metrologies of care and the proximate ruin of building 500 / Timothy Webmoor.

Call Number

JFF 16-1038

ISBN

• 9780415523622
• 0415523621
• 9781315778211 (canceled/invalid)

LCCN

• 2013042673
• 40023903321

OCLC

869458307

Title

Ruin memories : materiality, aesthetics and the archaeology of the recent past / edited by Bjørnar Olsen and Þóra Pétursdóttir.

Publisher

London ; New York : Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2014.

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Series

Archaeological orientations

Archaeological orientations.

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Note

ED: UNIVERSITY OF TROMSO. COLLECTION OF NEW ESSAYS. EUROPEAN FOCUS.

Connect to:

Cover image

Added Author

Olsen, Bjørnar, editor.

Þóra Pétursdóttir, 1978- editor.

Other Standard Identifier

40023903321

Research Call Number

JFF 16-1038