Pasts Otherwise: The Archaeology of War at Svrholt

(Hardback)

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Using an objects-based approach with a focus on arctic archaeology of WWII, this book attempts to unleash archaeologys potential by opting for a past that resists historical time and reveals the importance of a symmetrical archaeology approach to the past.

In this book, two leading theoretical archaeologists and the founding figures of what has been called symmetrical archaeology turn their attention to what kinds of pasts that archaeology make possible. The book is an attempt unleash archaeologys potential by opting for a past that resists historical time and the tropes of succession and replacement that the discipline has committed itself to for nearly two centuries. Olsen and Witmore take up this task by boldly targeting one of the periods most thoroughly studied by historians, WWII. Building on over a decade of archaeological fieldwork and excavation at Svrholt,an erstwhile Wehrmacht artillery battery of the Atlantic Wall at the outermost terrestrial edge of continental Europe, they demonstrate precisely what difference archaeology can make to a period saturated by history. Through in-depth archaeological engagements with the prisoner-of-war camp, fishing hamlet, battery, and garrison they offer pasts other than what archaeologists have always subsumed to take historical form. Among the innovations of this richly pictorial book is a novel design that begins with the encounter and works its way to pasts otherwise. Along the way the authors articulate new conceptions of presence, patience, waiting, and the post-history of things, while distilling new theoretical insights in text boxes that offer points of pause and excursus throughout the book. Through a detailed engagement with what remains above and below the surface, Olsen and Witmore touch on the central problems of archaeological engagement, inference, and interpretation.

Author Bio

Bjrnar J. Olsen is professor of archaeology at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Olsen has long been central to theoretical archaeology though it is in his pioneering work in the new materialisms and contemporary archaeology that he has made his most important contributions. His books include, In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects (Rowman & Littlefield 2010), with Shanks, Webmoor and Witmore, Archaeology: The Discipline of Things (2012), with Ptursdottir (eds), Ruin Memories: Materiality, Aesthetics and the Archaeology of the Recent Past (2014), with Burstrm, DeSilvey and . Ptursdttir (eds), After discourse: Things, Affects, Ethics (2021) and with Farstadvoll and Godin (eds), Unruly Heritage: Archaeologies of the Anthropocene (2024, Bloomsbury).

Christopher Witmore is Presidents Research Professor of archaeology at Texas Tech University. He is known for blending in-depth engagements alongside objects with longstanding and pressing questions of human and nonhuman existence. Witmore is among a few archaeologists who have been instrumental in reorienting archaeology from an exclusive focus on a distant past, to a field of interventions into the present, past, and future. His recent books include Objects Untimely (2023), with Graham Harman, and Old Lands. A Chorography of the Eastern Morea, Greece (2020).