Social Lives of Places and Things

Back to the archaeology of the contemporary past, particularly energy and war... revisiting material from last week and discussing further

Syncrude Plant, Fort McMurray, Alberta..... and the Trinity Test, 1945, New Mexico

As you know, this course uses anthropological / archaeological approaches to understand the social lives of things and places.

We've already explored some different ways to think about material culture/things. (E.g., studying the trajectories of an object's development, the ways it mediates between people, its afterlife as it is recirculated, recycled or put into landfills.)

We now start to think more about places, i.e. the "archaeology of the contemporary past" -- looking at sites and technology from our own culture's recent history. We'll talk about the theory of this after Reading Week.... but today, we're plunging into two fantastic large-scale case studies:

* the material culture / sites of the oil industry, particularly in Canada / Fort McMurray

* and the material culture / sites of the nuclear age... specifically, as seen through "atomic tourism"

- both require large-scale, expensive infrastructure which is interesting in its own right, as 'sites'

- both deal with using technology to harness energy found in the natural world (oil, the atom) for elaborate human purposes

- both oil production and nuclear weapons sites have become major tourist draws in recent years

- both are things that everyone alive today should probably know more about, because they may significantly affect our global future

Special Note: The readings for today were posted rather late by KD -- apologies -- but we hope you had a chance to get to them. If you didn't, please do make sure you read them for next class, as we'll be returning to these subjects after Reading Week.

Oil:

A brief history of the early days of the oil industry in Canada: www.petroleumhistory.ca/history/cdnbeginnings.html

And a few key events in Canada's oil history: www.petroleumhistory.ca/history/wells.html#springs

And the Alberta oil chronology: http://www.petroleumhistory.ca/history/chronologies.html

The End of Cheap Oil: http://www.globaloilwatch.com/reports/Cheap%20Oil.pdf

Material Culture and Archaeology of The Nuclear Age and Atomic Tourism

ATOMIC TOURISM:

Joseph Masco, "5:29:45 am", from Museum Cultures, about tourism at the Trinity site. PDF here (1060 Kb)

The Cold War and the Nuclear Age

n.b. If you know little about the Cold War, I encourage you to review at least the opening paragraph of this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War

Also: Please review the timeline of the Doomsday Clock (which gives a very brief history of the riskiest moments in the nuclear age): www.thebulletin.org/minutes-to-midnight/timeline.html

A Brief History of the Nuclear Age: www.theglobalist.com/DBWeb/printStoryId.aspx?StoryId=4968

Colleen Beck, “The Archaeology of Scientific Experiments at a Nuclear Testing Ground” (pdf, 1925 Kb)

Recommended: Dolff-Bonekamper, “The Berlin Wall: An Archaeological Site in Progress” (pdf, 1673 Kb)

The events behind today's class have their roots in the Russian Revolution (and the birth of the communist/ capitalist divide), and World War II (and the birth of nuclear weapons)...

"In February 1948, Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to address the hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens packed into Old Town Square. It was a crucial moment in Czech history -- a fateful moment of the kind that occurs once or twice in a millennium.

Gottwald was flanked by his comrades, with Clementis standing next to him. There were snow flurries, it was cold, and Gottwald was bareheaded. The solicitous Clementis took off his own fur cap and set it on Gottwald's head.

The Party propaganda section put out hundreds of thousands of copies of a photograph of that balcony with Gottwald, a fur cap on his head and comrades at his side, speaking to the nation. On that balcony the history of Communist Czechoslovakia was born. Every child knew the photograph from posters, schoolbooks, and museums.

Four years later Clementis was charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section immediately airbrushed him out of history and, obviously, out of all the photographs as well. Ever since, Gottwald has stood on that balcony alone. Where Clementis once stood, there is only bare palace wall. All that remains of Clementis is the cap on Gottwald's head."

"the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting"

"The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten.

In times when history still moved slowly, events were few and far between and easily committed to memory. They formed a commonly accepted backdrop for thrilling scenes of adventure in private life. Nowadays, history moves at a brisk clip. A historical event, though soon forgotten, sparkles the morning after with the dew of novelty. No longer a backdrop, it is now the adventure itself, an adventure enacted before the backdrop of the commonly accepted banality of private life.

Since we can no longer assume any single historical event, no matter how recent, to be common knowledge, I must treat events dating back only a few years as if they were a thousand years old. In 1939, German troops marched into Bohemia, and the Czech state ceased to exist. In 1945, Russian troops marched into Bohemia, and the country was once again declared an independent republic. The people showed great enthusiasm for Russia -- which had driven the Germans from their country -- and because they considered the Czech Communist Party its faithful representative, they shifted their sympathies to it. And so it happened that in February 1948 the Communists took power not in bloodshed and violence, but to the cheers of about half the population. And please note: the half that cheered was the more dynamic, the more intelligent, the better half.

Yes, say what you will -- the Communists were more intelligent. They had a grandiose program, a plan for a brand-new world in which everyone would find his place. The Communists' opponents had no great dream; all they had was a few moral principles, stale and lifeless, to patch up the tattered trousers of the established order. So of course the grandiose enthusiasts won out over the cautious compromisers and lost no time turning their dream into a reality: the creation of an idyll of justice for all.

Now let me repeat: an idyll, for all. People have always aspired to an idyll, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of harmony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men, where the world and all its people are molded from a single stock and the fire lighting up the heavens is the fire burning in the hearts of men, where every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily caught and squashed between the fingers like an insect.

From the start there were people who realized they lacked the proper temperament for the idyll and wished to leave the country. But since by definition an idyll is one world for all, the people who wished to emigrate were implicitly denying its validity. Instead of going abroad, they went behind bars. They were soon joined by thousands and tens of thousands more, including many Communists, such as Foreign Minister Clementis, the man who lent Gottwald his cap. Timid lovers held hands on movie screens, marital infidelity received harsh penalties at citizens' courts of honour, nightingales sang, and the body of Clementis swung back and forth like a bell ringing in a new dawn for mankind.

And suddenly those young, intelligent radicals had the strange feeling of having sent something into the world, a deed of their own making, which had taken on a life of its own, lost all resemblance to the original idea, and totally ignored the originators of the idea. So those young, intellectual radicals started shouting to their deed, calling it back, scolding it, chasing it, hunting it down."

But dissent was harshly punished under Communism, and so it took a long time for these regimes to fall.

and how Communism took hold in Europe (though the story varies from place to place)

This is the necessary background to understanding the significance of what remains of the Berlin Wall.

But it also gives a little insight into the epic battle between the superpowers, the USA and USSR, throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, which set the stage for the accumulation of nuclear weapons that persists today.

It also provides context through which to understand nuclear weapons in the USA, and the strange ways in which that history is being retold today...

Recommended: Dolff-Bonekamper, “The Berlin Wall: An Archaeological Site in Progress” (pdf, 1673 Kb)

It's within this context that it makes the most sense to look at the archaeology and tourism of atomic weapons sites, like Trinity, like the atomic museums Marc Lafleur discussed, and like other atomic tourism http://www.atomictourist.com/

- Colleen Beck on the archaeology of these sites: Colleen Beck, “The Archaeology of Scientific Experiments at a Nuclear Testing Ground” (pdf, 1925 Kb)

- How do these material remains / sites get used in narratives of recent history? Why does it matter?

- This also brings up the problem of... how do we signpost these radioactive/dangerously contaminated sites (and nuclear waste sites) for distant future generations? This requires us to think archaeologically in more ways than one.