Public Archaeologies from the Edge

Abstract

The chapter serves to introduce the first-ever book dedicated to public archaeologies of frontiers and borderlands. We identify the hitherto neglect of this critical field which seeks to explore the heritage, public engagements, popular cultures and politics of frontiers and borderlands past and present. We review the 2019 conference organised by Uiversity of Chester Archaeology students at the Grosvenor Museum, Chester, which inspired this book, and then survey the structure and contents of the collection. We advocate that public archaeologies should seek to incorporate and foreground perspectives 'from the edge'. By this we mean public archaeology should make frontiers and borderlands -including the people living with them and seeking to traverse them -paramount to future work.From IndyRef and Brexit, to the Refugee Crisis and Trump's Wall, frontiers dominate our news. In exploring both past and contemporary frontiers and borderlands, archaeological research can provide innovative perspectives and insights, revealing their creation, use, translation, removal, subversion, circumvention and reinvention. Sustained archaeological investigations can identify how frontier monuments and landscapes are not merely lines on a map, but zones that might possess topographic, economic, social, political, religious and ideological dimensions and may acquire biographies and significances contrasting from those intended and long after their creation (e.g. Hingley 2012). Borderlands, meanwhile, need not relate to clearly defined zones either side of a coherent 'border', but creative and fluid 'third spaces' distinct from core territories of polities; they can be networks where communities and social relations are transformed and re-fashioned (e.g. Naum 2010). Frontiers and borderlands can thus operate as zones of interaction and creativity as much as barriers and blockades. In these environments, new identities and societies can be fostered and reproduced.

Walled in: borderlands, frontiers and the future of archaeology

“…In particular, as scholarly research on past borders is drawn into fraught contemporary debates, we have begun to see the opening of a significant gap between the public perception of border zones and theoretical innovation in archaeology. Clarke and colleagues (2020: 2) note that “the broader task of public archaeologies of frontiers and borderlands is an as-yet largely unexplored field”, and one that must be developed. This is particularly pressing in the context of the development and reliance on hard boundaries—often demarcated by walls—as forms of control (Cooper & Tinning 2019; McAtackney & McGuire 2020); such boundaries may draw inspiration from the material remains of the past and the popular and scholarly discourse around them.…”