Abstract
Following work on a master’s thesis about relocating monuments, the author reflects on the way that public monuments form an archaeological record of a society, arguing that by thinking of monuments as archaeology rather than history, viewers are encouraged to see the objects as a living record of society, rather than as historical objects about the individuals or events being memorialised. As with any archaeology, recording the artefacts and their contexts is also important, and these concepts are explored with regards to statues and public monuments.
Highlights
In 2019, as an archaeology master’s student, I wrote a thesis about contextualising relocated monuments
I travelled around Eastern Europe looking at post-Soviet statue parks and the way in which they had presented the context of their relocated statues
The aim of my analysis was to assess the effectiveness of the statue parks in Hungary, Lithuania and Russia in achieving this objective
Summary
In 2019, as an archaeology master’s student, I wrote a thesis about contextualising relocated monuments. One of the strongest arguments for keeping statues, or placing them in museums, had been their educational value. Buffington, in which she identified three different types of context – the history of the person or event being depicted, the time in which the object was created and the present time in which the work is being viewed and understood.[1] To this I added physical context – where the object was placed and its relationship to its surroundings.
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