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Archaeologists have been investigating the contemporary world since the early 1970s – but for its first couple of decades this field was a fringe interest that involved using modern material culture more to help understand archaeological traces from earlier times, rather than for studying contemporary society itself. Bill Rathje’s well-known ‘garbology’ work examining modern rubbish in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s is a notable exception, laying vital foundations for what was to follow, and from the late 1990s archaeological interest in the present grew. Since then, increasing numbers have followed Rathje in realising that the study of contemporary material culture can shed critical light on our present actions and their future implications, as well as improving our understanding of the past. It is now 30 years since I began to investigate the Cold War era through an archaeological lens, and 16 since I co-wrote After Modernity: archaeological approaches to the contemporary past with UCL’s Rodney Harrison, and I would argue that it is now even more important for archaeologists to investigate the contemporary world alongside the study of past worlds for which our discipline is much better known. Here, I will explain why.
The contemporary past
Archaeological investigations of the present seem like a contradiction, given a literal definition that aligns archaeology with ancient societies. Since archaeology emerged as a recognised field of study around 200 years ago, though, the past has been catching up with us. From an initial focus only on ancient cultures, archaeologists have come to study the medieval period, post-medieval and industrial societies, the Second World War, and now – finally – the contemporary world.
Each of these time periods involves different types of data in the form of distinct artefact- and site-types, bringing their own research challenges and opportunities. There are at least three key differences for the archaeological study of the contemporary world, however. First, it involves working at the boundary between past and future, including both the near future that will soon be upon us and the more distant ‘deep’ future that lies beyond it. Second, it is a period of which we have direct lived experience: we are not only investigating past societies, as archaeologists are used to doing, but instead are studying a period that we actively shape and influence in our everyday lives and practices. Put another way, rather than making the unfamiliar familiar, as archaeologists do for earlier periods, we are doing the direct opposite, rendering the familiar unfamiliar. Third, archaeology traditionally involves the excavation of buried remains. However, contemporary archaeology exists almost entirely on the surface and therefore in plain sight. These remains will be buried eventually; just not yet (although, as I will discuss below, there are exceptions).
These differences can make contemporary archaeology conceptually challenging, but they also provide archaeologists with unrivalled opportunities to help people critically reassess their presumptions about a world they think they understand. It was these challenges and opportunities that inspired me to focus my archaeological work on the contemporary world rather than the distant past – though I did start this journey on a more conventional path, learning vital lessons on archaeological theory, methods, and material cultures, and about different time periods and how they are represented in the archaeological record. As a student, I was drawn in particular to the world’s earliest human occupants, largely due to the subtlety of their surviving traces, and the skills and theoretical thinking required to interpret their meaning.
To help with this interpretation, my teachers (notably Clive Gamble and Peter Ucko) used ethnoarchaeology as a lens through which to view the deep past. This involved us studying modern-day hunter-gatherer societies in the Arctic, Africa’s Kalahari Desert, and in Australia, better to understand people living comparable lifestyles in the past, and often under similar environmental conditions. As a comparative approach this is now contested, but it was this critical engagement with the present that led me to become a contemporary archaeologist.
The Van
In 2006, with colleagues from the University of Bristol, and through the generous donation of a Ford Transit van previously used for archaeological fieldwork by the Ironbridge Institute, a project was devised to focus on the everyday and mundane aspects of the lives and work of archaeologists. Archaeology has always involved the recovery of material remains with a view to unpacking everyday encounters between people and their landscape in the past. This was no different, except that the past was recent and the people involved were still around to contribute their stories and experiences. Those people also happened to be archaeologists! We had another aim, too, of challenging our audiences to engage with new concepts of archaeology and to embrace a broader and more radical definition of the subject than many were used to. The project involved the forensic dismantling of the vehicle, recording everything as we went. It was, to all intents and purposes, a meticulous archaeological excavation. The project resulted in several publications and a short film called In Transit by (then) MA student Greg Bailey (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU046CAFrJE).
Suffice to say, The Van divided opinion. Yet diverse audiences – including passers-by, students, school groups, a police forensics team, workers at the Ford Transit factory in Southampton, and many others who later read the publications or saw the film – were inspired by our work. In fact, it still inspires students on archaeology courses today, around the world, where The Van forms a key element of teaching about archaeological method and theory, heritage and media, and, of course, archaeologies of the contemporary world. There were also those who described it as ‘daft’ and ‘pointless’, but either way it provoked discussion online, in classrooms, and on many dig sites. It brought joy and laughter, surprise, and delight to many who encountered the project and its outputs. The film made my mother cry, remembering her first car. But most importantly, it demonstrated ways that contemporary archaeology is a creative practice that inspires people to recognise value in the everyday and in the mundane – something often taken for granted in archaeologies of earlier periods.
Adrift
In 2022, Tracey Williams published a wonderful book: Adrift: the curious tale of the Lego lost at sea. She describes the archaeological legacy of a shipwreck off England’s south-west coast in 1997, in which a container filled with some 5 million Lego pieces fell into the sea. In the 30 years since that event, these pieces have been washing up along the coastlines of southern and south-west England (see CA 391). One of the book’s chapters is titled ‘Archaeology of the Tides: artefacts of the Plastic Age’, illustrating many of the finds, often by typological category. This project matches my own interests in waste and plastics, and their impacts on planetary health. Like Tracey and other contemporary archaeologists, I am convinced that archaeology provides a novel and helpful way to study these plastics as material traces revealing the human behaviours that created them.
My plastics work has taken me to Australia and to Galapagos, involving collaborations with researchers from a diversity of subjects but notably marine biology, oceanography, environmental psychology, and ecotoxicology (CA 422). Archaeology has long been an interdisciplinary subject, but contemporary archaeology provides opportunities to rethink how these collaborations might work, and how to be collaborative with new partners and subject areas in ways that still prioritise archaeological data. The work in Galapagos involved the Galapagos Conservation Trust, local communities, and scientists from all of those subjects mentioned above, and more. This project was aligned directly with Rathje’s earlier work on contemporary material culture, with many of the participants happily describing themselves as ‘garbologists’.
Through an object-based approach widely used in archaeology, applied here to items of plastic waste recovered from Galapagos beaches, it was possible to determine where the waste was coming from and who was responsible for creating it. We can now use these archaeological data to mitigate pollution locally, including through policy-making, while presenting garbology as a popular and workable method for wider application. For archaeologists this feels like an obvious win, involving the study of the characteristic yet potentially harmful artefacts that define our Plastic Age.
Skating and clubbing
An archaeological approach can be applied to contemporary leisure activities as well. One recent example (featured in Episode 1, Series 13, of Digging for Britain) was the Kelvin Wheelies skatepark in Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Park, which was closed in 1983 and subsequently buried. To avoid this place becoming ‘forgotten and lost’, Glasgow University’s Kenny Brophy conducted an excavation that allowed members of the local skating community to encounter the site once again, and to share their experiences of it. In a way, this skatepark excavation is very typical of contemporary archaeology: it isn’t necessarily what is found that matters most, but the opportunities that the process of discovery provides – for example, in memory-making, and in recreating a sense of identity.
With colleagues at Liverpool University, and while I was at Historic England in the early 2000s, I was involved in a project that explored contemporary music-making within the city. This was not a project about the Beatles or their legacy, but rather about those young people who were now making music in the city’s suburbs, often among communities experiencing high deprivation and not in any way influenced by the city’s musical alumni. The Hip Hop that they created in their ‘cribs’ and the social networks around this scene provided a landscape archaeology of parts of the contemporary city for which few other sources existed to tell the story.
I undertook a similar project in Berlin, investigating the techno scene and how it took shape in the long shadow of the Cold War. This was not so much about the superclubs, but about the subtler traces of a pop-up scene that existed in everyday settings such as underpasses and U-Bahn stations.
There are many other archaeological examples. In 2011, I worked with fellow contemporary archaeologist Paul Graves-Brown to record a series of cartoon portraits that punk pioneers the Sex Pistols had drawn on the walls of 6 Denmark Street, London, in 1975-1976 (CA 268). This investigation was published in the journal Antiquity, and our paper argued for the cultural significance of the art, on the basis that they were a rare physical trace of a punk movement that was largely ephemeral yet culturally transformative. Like the Sex Pistols artworks, the excavation of the former Reno nightclub in Manchester, by its community of former clubgoers, attracted significant media attention (CA 342). This project involved the excavation of a building demolished in 1986, by a community with no previous archaeological experience (but with the support of some who did). The process, and the finds that were made, prompted powerful reactions among the participants, similarly to those people who were involved in Rachael Kiddey’s heritage and homelessness project. Participation in archaeological activities can change people’s lives in unforeseen and positive ways, rebuilding community and identity in situations where it has been lost.
War and peace
One might assume that the contemporary world is awash with documentation, removing the need for archaeological interventions to fill knowledge gaps. The Cold War is a good illustration of the fact that knowledge gaps do still exist, and that archaeology can help to fill them. For militarisation in the Cold War, one can define three main likely sources of evidence: historical documentation, first-hand accounts, and the physical remains that survive. Of these, historical records (at least, those referring to the sites themselves) often remain classified and are therefore unavailable for research purposes. First-hand accounts are often equally inaccessible, because anyone with useful insight will have signed the Official Secrets Act, meaning that they cannot reveal what they know. This means that surviving Cold War sites mirror those of much earlier periods, with only the surviving physical evidence to help interpretation.
Beyond the military sites themselves, there are often associated places that were never documented. A good example is the peace or protest camps, such as those that existed at Greenham Common in West Berkshire and outside the Nevada Test Site in the USA, occupied by people objecting to nuclear armament and the existential threat that it presented. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, working with numerous colleagues, I studied these places and their adjacent military sites, creating archaeological records of these Cold War landscapes.
In Nevada, the surviving remains of Peace Camp were highly ephemeral, contrasting with the massive infrastructure existing within the Test Site itself. They were also surprisingly archaeological in character, with stone arrangements forming circles and rows, and standing stones acting as navigational markers for key locations within the camp. These stone arrangements and the way that they clustered reminded me of my early work in Wessex, and site visits on Dartmoor where Bronze Age monuments take a very similar form. At Greenham Common, surface clearance of vegetation revealed the presence of hearths at two of the many peace camps that encircled the military base, alongside traces of domestic facilities still visible in the trees, such as the ends of washing lines and shower fittings. Following the advice of a former Greenham Peace Woman, we located an undocumented and small temporary camp that was used to observe operations within the base. There, the tents were packed up and hidden after each short occupation, and our informant was able to retrieve her belongings (her tarpaulin tent or ‘bender’, and a mug) from under the gorse bush where she had hidden them many years before. At both Nevada and Greenham Common, our archaeological documentation provides the only physical records of these camps, and of the kinds of protest that characterise the contemporary world.
The future
All archaeological work matters – it helps us to understand the past, shapes how we imagine alternative futures, and invites people to engage directly in uncovering and preserving human stories. But if archaeology is to remain truly relevant, it must look not only backwards, but squarely at the world we inhabit today. Contemporary archaeology gives us the tools to interrogate the material traces of our own lives, revealing the often unseen relationships between people, behaviours, and things, and reminding us that the present is already becoming the past. In doing so, it transforms archaeology into a vibrant, forward-looking discipline, one that not only documents change, but actively helps us make sense of it, and to influence it. Unearthing and critically rethinking the present is not simply one option among many: it is one of the most urgent and meaningful contributions archaeologists can make. If we embrace this challenge, we ensure that archaeology continues to be not only a study of what has been, but a vital lens through which to see who we are and so to understand who we might yet become.
Source: John Schofield is a Professor in the Archaeology Department at the University of York, where he teaches Cultural Heritage Management and Contemporary Archaeology.
All images: John Schofield, unless otherwise stated
