Pasts Otherwise

Unleash archaeology’s potential by turning toward pasts that resist historical time and reveal the power of an archaeology other than history.
History has long shaped our expectations of what the past is and how it should be recalled, written, and displayed. Thus while objects of all ages endure and accumulate around us—often broken and fragmented—we continue to interpret them through historical tropes of completion, succession, and replacement. What if we were to see this indiscriminate persistence and fragmentation not as archaeological defects to be mended by history and historical narration, but as material expressions suggestive of pasts other than history? What might these other pasts look like, and how might we account for them?

In this book, Bjørnar Olsen and Christopher Witmore pursue these questions. Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork at Sværholt—an abandoned fishing hamlet, Wehrmacht artillery battery, and prisoner-of-war camp in Arctic Norway—they explore what difference archaeology can make when working with objects routinely saturated by history. Through meticulous material investigations, novel ways of writing, and striking imagery, the authors open glimpses onto the distinctive pasts that forgotten things remember. In attending to what endures above and below the surface, they also confront central challenges of archaeological thought and interpretation, developing new conceptions of presence, patience, and waiting. The result is a bold and compelling vision of what archaeology might yet become.