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CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Standing on the shoreline
Growing up on the east coast of Sweden a walk on the beach was like a
treasure hunt where washed up plastic bottles or cans with Russian writing
were like messages from another world. I could not see this other world but
I was told that it was very different from my own. I did not know what the
Iron Curtain was back then but the Baltic Sea most certainly felt like a big
barrier in which Russian submarines would occasionally take a ‘wrong turn’
and surface a bit too close for comfort, a big barrier that separated ‘us’ from
‘them’ and which was to colour my views of Eastern and Western Europe.
Years later I was working as a Heritage Consultant in London. Following
guidelines such as Institute for Archaeologists (IFA) guidelines and best
practice documents from English Heritage, I worked on Desk Based Assessments,
Conservation Plans and Environmental Impact Assessments. I directed
fieldwork to mitigate the negative impacts of roadwork, new pipelines
or other construction projects. Together with my colleagues we were looking
out for the heritage of our past and making sure it was preserved for
future generations, if not in situ then at least through records. There was,
however, little discussion in how this heritage had come to be. What factors
and processes are involved in making these sites that we investigate
What has come to fascinate me more and more whilst carrying out the
work on my thesis are the processes involved in creating the past that we see
around us. Heritage does not just happen; it is created and recreated as part
of our history writing. To an archaeologist it should probably not come as a
surprise how important the material is to the way we view and write our
history, but somehow it still did. In this thesis I look closer at how a
material part of our history that we see around us today has come to be the
way it is. By looking at how the material of the Iron Curtain has developed
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