The life history framework was applied to US presidential elections. Six stages were recognized, beginning with declaration of candidacy and ending with inauguration. Evidence suggested that each stage has a distinctive constellation of artifacts. Of special interest were unofficial inauguration artifacts. In this photo essay the author documented a sample of such artifacts offered for sale by Black street vendors in connection with Barack Hussein Obama’s 2009 inauguration. The artifacts were mostly small enough to be tucked into suitcases, inexpensive and clearly marked the event through visual performance. Tourists who came for the inauguration were agents who distributed these artifacts throughout the country, perhaps the world.

When a flotation machine, an object routinely employed at archaeological sites, was featured prominently in an art exhibition, its significance did not simply change. As well as interrupting the machine’s meaning (function), the act and event also made possible the emergence of new forms of attention, and of different means of engagement with the object. This paper explores the collaboration between archaeology and art where this occurred, the exhibition Geography of Looking in the Ar/Ge Kunst art space in the city of Bolzano in northeast Italy. The introduction of a flotation machine into the art space initiated a dialogue about the perception, interpretation and disciplinary boundaries of archaeology. Entangled in artistic discursive practice and curated as such, the flotation machine unexpectedly became more “archaeological”. The implications of this collaboration on our understanding and framing of archaeological practice elicited a new question: when is archaeology? This question foregrounds the potential of archaeology to become more democratic, inclusive and responsive, and proposes a more collective and boundary-crossing looking. The paper contributes to the growing discourse on contemporary archaeology and art, inviting further collaborations and co-creations. What role is there for archaeology approaching the contemporary, and is there a prospect for a deep and enduring looking into an alternative, otherwise world building?

The “complaint tablet to Ea-Naṣir” was discovered during Leonard Woolley’s excavations at Ur in the 1920s, and is currently on display in the British Museum. The tablet, with its cuneiform inscription, dated to ca. 1750 BC, is an excoriating attack on Ea-Naṣir’s fraudulent business practices, and has become known as the world’s oldest customer complaint. In 2015 the complaint tablet was the subject of popular viral social media posts on Reddit and tumblr, followed by a surge of international news coverage. Since then the complaint tablet has become a popular and unusually-long-lasting internet meme. Ea-Naṣir, his poor-quality copper ingots and other elements from the inscribed narrative have been creatively combined with images and references to popular culture, current affairs and established meme formats. In this paper I explore the emergence, development and endurance of the Ea-Naṣir meme, based on a corpus of images, texts and related commentary collected from digital media. My analysis, grounded in a framework for studying the dynamics of memetic processes, argues that the meme serves primarily as an “in-joke” for online communities, while Ea-Naṣir himself has been transformed into an archetypal “trickster” figure. While focused on a specific case study, the methods and framework offer a starting point for future research on internet memes in digital folklore, reception studies and allied fields.

Harry’s Wall is a site in rural Cheshire where thousands of colourful messages dedicated to the singer and actor Harry Styles are inscribed on the ageing bricks of a nineteenth-century railway viaduct. What initially began as a research project for the MA Contemporary Art & Archaeology at UHI Orkney (Thomas 2024) has since developed into a deep engagement with the site through time, as I have followed the changes both in the messages and in the media attention that the viaduct has attracted. In this paper I briefly introduce the site and Styles himself, and define my research, its challenges and methodology, before illustrating some common themes in the messages. I then consider the value of a fan “shrine” as a contemporary archaeological investigation and highlight questions it raises for heritage professionals. The research has demonstrated that such sites, sometimes easy to dismiss, can hold deeper heritage value than we may initially assume.

This photo essay presents an approach to post-industrial landscapes through single objects and their motifs. The stimulus for these reflections came from revisiting photographs I took of North Shields Fish Quay, a deindustrialised fishing port in northeast England. The essay combines fieldwork photographs and interviews conducted with the local Association of Retired Fishermen to reveal the material and discursive lingering of ships in North Shields Fish Quay. Drawing on the concept of “surface encounters”, I envision the potential of these industrial objects to intervene between researcher and participant. The essay describes the attentive dialogues that may have emerged between me and the retired fishers through embracing the physicality of these boats rather than what they symbolise. These reflections offer insight for scholars of deindustrialisation and contemporary archaeologists using participant-oriented methods.

The interdisciplinary research project “Lexicon of Katyn Archaeology (1990–2015)” aims to collect formerly dispersed material relating to research that was undertaken during the 1990s and early 2000s on traces of the Katyn Massacre of 1940, in which Soviet forces killed 22,000 Polish officers who were prisoners in the USSR. An important part of the project comprises ethnographic interviews with researchers and participants in archaeological work that took place at execution and burial sites. These interviews make it possible to reconstruct the course of the research and to identify significant aspects that sometimes escape historical studies, archaeological reports and analytical scientific texts, but that emerge from a biographical, personal and emotional context. The project also involves interviews with people whose biographies, experiences and memories are connected with the Katyn Massacre. These reveal the reception of the archaeological research by those with the most personal interest in it, as well as what is recorded in individual experience and family memory. They also indicate practised and postulated forms of commemoration.

This theoretical article outlines the main ideas and concepts of “necroheritage”, focusing particularly on remains, artefacts, mass graves, clandestine burial sites and killing sites as a specific type of cultural-natural heritage. It introduces the concept of “necrocide” in the context of mass killings and genocides to refer to the mechanical and chemical destruction of remains and graves intended to conceal mass crimes and obstruct or at least impede the identification of victims. The project highlights also the importance of “exhumates”, meaning artefacts and ecofacts extracted from graves during exhumations that serve as evidence of crimes and provide deep insights into the past lives of humans and environmental changes caused by human intervention. The article further considers postanthropocentric ethics, to address artefacts, ecofacts and various nonhuman entities that participate in or bear witness to processes of destruction and decomposition. By integrating heritage, forensics and ecological studies, necroheritage addresses historical, social, ecological and ethical considerations, providing critical insights into the ontology of human and nonhuman remains and things; the ecology of (mass) graves; religious and spiritual aspects of remains and sites; and memory. It proposes future-oriented strategies for contemplating, researching, managing and commemorating mass killing sites.

The First Italian Conference on Contemporary Archaeology (CIAC) was held at the University of Pisa between 30 November and 2 December, 2023. The conference was co-organised by the Universities of Pisa (MAPPA Laboratory – Francesca Anichini and Gabriele Gattiglia) and the University of Bari (Giuliano De Felice). Italy has a solid tradition of post-medieval archaeology, which historically has welcomed and supported contributions from the emerging field of contemporary archaeology in publications and events. However, the landscape is rapidly changing, in terms both of education and of research.

This paper discusses the musealised material remains of the All-Poland Women’s Strike, an activity that mobilised around 430,000 protestors against a new restrictive abortion law introduced by the Polish government in 2020. These remains, comprising banners and posters made of cardboard and paper bearing images and slogans, can be understood as “weak artefacts”: ephemeral, flammable, easily damaged, but also resilient and persistent. Following feminist philosophers, the paper argues that weak artefacts are manifestations of a fierce and long-lasting resistance that at the same time embodies the postulates of activist archaeology. The paper points to the emancipatory potential of weak artefacts and discusses how an archaeological approach to things and materiality as well as archaeological activism may support research on contemporary feminist heritage in Poland. The protests took place during the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, in autumn 2020, and so the study is also partly situated within the growing field of covid archaeology.

The first months of World War II in Gdańsk Pomerania saw the mass murder of local intellectual elites, of people with mental disorders or disabilities and of representatives of the small Jewish community. The Germans usually hid the victims’ bodies in mass graves. About 30 places of execution from this “bloody autumn of 1939” were destroyed in the second half of 1944, as part of Aktion 1005, an operation to conceal evidence of the crimes. In this paper, we present the historical context for the characteristics of the necrosol from one mass grave in the Szpęgawsk Forest, which was destroyed/desecrated by the Germans at the end of 1944. The research proves that even the destruction of mass graves by exhuming the bodies and burning them leaves material traces that allow for the reconstruction of the organisation of the crime and the methods of covering it up.