Theme:
1. The Material Record: Current Trends and Future Directions
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
Monumental Issues: Archaeological Approaches to the Public Materialities of Contested Pasts
Content:
In recent years, the defacement and toppling of historic monuments by the BLM and other protest movements has filled the headlines and prompted public debates. Monuments are powerful and politicized physical structures that can endure for centuries in city centres.
As the passage of time obscures their original meaning, they can acquire a quality of benign anonymity. However, monuments often embody links to dark pasts and traumatic memory, particularly when statues commemorate one-sided narratives of war, colonization, and slavery.
In this session we will discuss the monument as a concept, using biographical and semiotic approaches to explore the changing lives, management practices, and embedded meanings that may be found in public monuments. Our starting point is the position that monuments are more than commemorative objects. Erected in ordinary and mundane locations, such as public squares and parks, monuments are integrated into the everyday lives of city and/or countryside dwellers. Monuments are sites of remembrance, although only if people recognize them as such. Often, their weathered stone facades and oxidized patina bestow a sense of historical time depth and continuity upon a place, creating ontological security. But as recent protests have shown, the latent powers associated with historic monuments can be re-exposed to kindle public outrage and dissent.
Our session invites contributions that investigate what a monument can be, reasons to build and/or remove them, and the meanings of its management acts. We welcome papers working on theories, methodologies, and case studies not only in Europe and North America, but also in the Global South. Our aim is study how the rise of voices that seek to decolonize urban space, as well as changes in global power dynamics and the efforts to promote multipolarity, may have the potential to transform the public perception of monuments to become potentially inclusive healing apparatus.
Keywords:
Contemporary Archaeology, Monuments, Politics of the Past, Materialities, Contested Past
Session associated with MERC:
no
Session associated with CIfA:
no
Session associated with SAfA:
no
Session associated with CAA:
no
Session associated with DGUF:
no
Session associated with other:
Main organiser:
Nour A. Munawar (Qatar) 1
Co-organisers:
James Symonds (Netherlands) 2
José Antonio Gonzalez Zarandona (United Kingdom) 3
Affiliations:
1. Doha Institute for Graduate Studies
2. University of Amsterdam (UvA)
3. Newcastle University
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