Ruin Memories: Materialities, Aesthetics and the Archaeology of the Recent Past

ISBN-13: 9780415523622 / Angielski / Twarda / 2014 / 510 str.

Bjørnar Olsen;Þóra Pétursdóttir;¬Abar

Opis

Since the 19th century, mass-production, consumerism & cycles of material replacement have accelerated; increasingly larger amounts of things are increasingly rapidly victimized & made redundant. At the same time processes of destruction have immensely intensified, although largely overlooked when compared to the research & social significance devoted to consumption & production. The outcome is a ruin landscape of derelict factories, closed shopping malls, overgrown bunkers & redundant mining towns; a ghostly world of decaying modern debris normally left out of academic concerns & 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 & scholarly interest in modern ruins in general. This book examines this topic.

Spis treści

1. Ruins – concepts, theories and attitudes  2. Modern ruins and heritage  3. Material memory  4. Aesthetics, art, attraction  5. Abandonment  6. Archaeologies of the recent past

O autorze

Bjørnar Olsen is Professor of Archaeology at the Department of Archaeology and Social Anthropology, University of Tromsø, Norway. His research interests include Sámi culture, contemporary archaeology, material culture, and thing theory. His latest books are In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects (2010), Persistent Memories: Pyramiden – a Soviet mining town in the High Arctic (2010, with E. Andreassen and H. Bjerck), and Archaeology: The Discipline of Things (2012,with M. Shanks, T. Webmoor and C. Witmore).He is director of the Ruin Memories project. Þóra Pétursdóttir defended her doctoral thesis in archaeology, with the title Concrete Matters: towards an archaeology of things, at the University of Tromsø, Norway, in November 2013. Her main research interests lie in archaeological theory and practice, thing theory and archaeology of the recent past and present.