Archaeology at Home; Notes on Things, Life and Time; Bjerck

Hein B. Bjerck [+–]

Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)

Hein B. Bjerck is professor in archaeology (research and teaching) at the NTNU University Museum in Trondheim. His research is focussed on early marine foraging (Marine Ventures project), and large scale excavation projects (Ormen Lange project). Bjerck is also involved in research on the recent past, and project member in Ruin Memories, After Discourse and Objects Matter.

Archaeology at Home takes a deep dive into the entanglements between humans and their things, exploring the notion that things themselves “remember” when left by “their” people and illustrating how the integration of humans and things involves connections running all the way from the present into deep time.

Combining methods from contemporary and deep-time archaeology and balancing scholarly archaeology with personal narrative, the author presents three case studies of homes all intimately known to him — the home of his father after his abrupt passing, the home of his uncle that was lost in a fire, and a Stone Age home he excavated many years ago. This evocative approach to archaeologies of memory will be appreciated by professional archaeologists as well as members of the general public who are drawn to the study of the past and things that connect us with it.

Prelims

Acknowledgements

Humans and Non-humans that Found their Way into this Book

Chapter 1

When does the Past Begin? [+–]

The chapter introduces the thematic scope, objectives, and the build-up of contents. The text is closely related to my career and scholarly experiences as an archaeologist, but also subjective, revealing personal thoughts on humans, time and things that are mostly left out in scientific texts. Perhaps the traditional frames for scientific publications are too restrictive?

Chapter 2

My Father’s Things [+–]

The Chapter elaborates on things and memories, how things emit memories, things and individual remembering, things on the move to the faceless archaeological record. The arena is the process of dealing with my father’s home after his abrupt passing in 2009 – that turned into some kind of field study that revealed the ‘insides’ of a home, his times, his life, and this peculiar entanglement of things, humans and happenings.

Chapter 3

Scorched Memories from My Uncle’s Burnt Home [+–]

In 2013, the next house to my father’s home was severely damaged by fire. It was the home of my uncle, he was living in what previously was my grandmother’s home – also a home I have wandered in and out of in my lifetime. The situation was the exact opposite from the home of my father. He left his things exactly as they were – as they were in a ‘live’ home. My uncle survived (barely), but lost his realm of things. His things were still recognizable, but useless … half-burned, stinking and damp. As a consequence, the telling from my uncle’s home are quite different.

Chapter 4

A Home from the Deep Past [+–]

In the 1980’s, as a newly educated archaeologist, we discovered a large Stone Age settlement that contained some 20 dwelling foundations at Vega, Northern Norway. The site is very old, close to 9500 years, and the permanent houses at the site are among the oldest in Norway. We excavated the remains of one of these – also apparently a home to a group of humans that have long since vanished. The island still remembers many things about how it was at the time, and the settlement, the excavated home and the abundant artifacts still remember their people. A ‘presentistic’ perspective entangle past and present, the place, the encampment, the dwelling, and lithic artifacts, and produces a narrative rarely included in traditional ‘scientific’ reporting. Perhaps the Stone Age home and the homes of my father and uncle are not as distant as they appear?

Chapter 5

Archaeology at Home – Things, Memories, Life and Time [+–]

Homes – this peculiar constellation of humans, places and things seem to reach wide and deep into humans’ lives. Even distant stoneagers had homes, perhaps many – even the homeless in our time have homes. Rich or poor, temporal or stable, however different – they rarely last for long. As individuals come and go in an ever-changing world, homes with their things are in constant flux. Things may spill from one home to another, but seem to be gradually pushed towards the peripheries as their memories and fade. As part of active memoryscapes, some of these memories have faces and names for a brief time – others have to rely on archaeological skills to be recognised.

Reviews

A majestic work, full of experiment and sensuous detail. Equally haunting, melancholic, and amusing: a narrative tour-de-force. Hein Bjerck writes with a unique voice, evoking place, people, and emotion with affect seldom, if ever, found in archaeological or historic text. Part love-letter to his father, uncle, and his own past, part meditation on objects, things, memory, humanity, relationships, and the passage of time, Archaeology at Home exceeds the boundaries of any one discipline. An instant classic.
Professor Doug Bailey, Department of Anthropology, San Francisco State University

We are being convinced that the future of archaeology lies in technology, but the future of archaeology lies in imagination: our capacity to recreate other pasts, other futures and other ways of telling them. In this fascinating book, Hein Bjerck tells us about 9,500-year old houses and his own family’s homes and explores in an original way memory, materiality and experiences of domesticity that are at the same time intimate and remote. In so doing, he shows us the path to a new kind of archaeology: one that is tremendously creative and full of emotion, an archaeology that mixes past and present, the social and the personal, self and others, science and narrative. This book will be essential reading for anybody interested in the archaeology of the contemporary past, the archaeology of domestic space and new forms of storytelling in the humanities and the social sciences.
Alfredo González-Ruibal, Institute of Heritage Sciences (Spanish National Research Council)

It is a deep and moving book, that seems to begin as a funny challenge: may an archaeologist do an archaeology of his/her own home? Far beyond family chronicles, Bjerck has written a remarkable and sensitive essay on things, life and time, seen from inside.
Professor Laurent Olivier, Curator in chief, Musée d'Archéologie nationale, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France

Archaeology at Home is a book that causes us to stop and think, to re-evaluate our practise and approach both collectively and individually, a book that challenges archaeologists to do what we do better. In a masterful blend of contemporary archaeology and early prehistory, Bjerck breathes life into the past and its fragments of humankind. This book asks us to re-position ourselves in archaeological interpretation and narrative, to ‘write from somewhere’, and to consider how the lives we live can inform the lives lived in the recent and distant pasts. It is a book about relationships: between the past and present; between humans and non-humans; between worlds; between memory and the tangible; between lost and found. Archaeology at Home is inspiring, thought provoking and evocative. It also contains an ingredient rarely found in archaeological writing and research – humour.
Dr. Marion Dowd, Lecturer in Prehistoric Archaeology, Institute of Technology Sligo

In 1790, a young writer locked himself at home to study the wonders of what lay closest by. The resulting account, 'A Journey Around My Room', now holds renewed significance following two years of a Pandemic confining many of us to home. During my confinement, I started to wonder what an excavation of my own life might reveal - what I might learn about myself that I hadn't otherwise realised. But my entangled domestic mess remains untouched, for now. I am therefore both envious and admiring of Archaeology at Home, an eloquent and close encounter which stands as a modern day 'Journey', not around a room but of a life, or lives to be precise. The work is unashamedly and unmistakably an archaeology book, reflecting on people's stories told through the itineraries of material objects, places and landscape. In a unique and highly readable account, the author reveals what all archaeologists know but others may not - that archaeologists make the best story-tellers and that our stories will be contemporary and they can be deeply intimate. And aren't those stories always the best?!
Professor John Schofield, Archaeology, University of York

This is a book that addresses one of the deepest paradoxes of archaeology: its desire, on the one hand, to understand and re-connect with past human lives and on the other, the realization “that most of what relates to being a human in the past are outside the fragments of our archaeological record”. What do you do when faced with such a paradox? Pretend it doesn’t exist and carry on as before, trying to overcome the limitations of the archaeological record? Or accept that archaeology has the potential to be something else? In this book, Bjerck bravely chooses the second option. Drawing on the wide field of new materialisms, symmetrical archaeology and a machine-oriented ontology, he explores three ‘homes’ as case studies: his late father’s; an uncle’s house consumed by flames; and a Mesolithic camp. For Bjerck these homes are best seen as thing-regimes, special human-thing collectives. But what makes his approach unique is his personal connection to all three sites. This is an object-oriented ontology with a human face. Ultimately, what makes Bjerck’s solution to the paradox so compelling is that even if past lives will always elude our grasp, the situated nature of our own engagement with these remains ensures that the human dimension in this object-oriented world is never lost. It is what frames everything; these homes take on the contours they have, precisely because Hein Bjerck is part of them, he is writing from a position fully immersed within these thing-regimes. As he himself describes it, this is a kind of auto-archaeology; but it is also more. This is also an exercise in archaeology as memory, and as we read it, we realize we are not just visiting three homes, but also, in a way, returning home.
Professor Gavin Lucas, Archaeology, University of Iceland

Archaeology

Books and Journals in Humanities, Social Science and Performing Arts

Archaeology at Home

Notes on Things, Life and Time

Hein B. Bjerck [+–]

Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)

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