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1: INTRODUCTION
carried out of the materiality of the Inner German Border and the Berlin
Wall (Klausmeier and Schmidt 2004, Schmidt and von Preuschen 2005,
Faversham and Schmidt 2007, Rottman 2008, Klausmeier 2009). Elsewhere,
however, there is little research to inform us of what the militarised borders
looked like, how they functioned, how they affected the people around them
and how the borders, and the remains thereof, have continued to affect
people also after the events of 1989.
I have used Churchill’s description of an Iron Curtain stretching from
the Baltic to the Adriatic to limit myself geographically but this is of course
just a limitation I have set as a necessary approach to what would otherwise
be too vast a material. I have also limited myself to the time period between
1945, the end of World War II and 1989, the fall of many of the military
borders in central Europe. The reader should be aware, however, that the
Iron Curtain can be described in many different ways both metaphorically
and geographically and can be seen to stretch throughout the world and
across different time periods.
Studying the Iron Curtain
Discussions of methodology have been an important part of the work of my
thesis from beginning to end. During a very early consultation with my tutor,
before I was about to embark on my first fieldwork, we discussed recording
methods. When I suggested that I would require some sort of GPS to record
the coordinates of any finds that I made out in the terrain my tutor asked me
why I needed to be so precise, why not just mark them on a map The
question threw me and I thought to myself: “but this is what we do”. We
identify, we measure, we record, we describe and we report and it all needs to
be exact so that we can demonstrate that it has all been carried out to good
scientific standards. Otherwise it is just not good archaeology. Or is it In her
doctoral thesis archaeologist Laura McAtackney (2008:8 and 16) discusses the
role of traditional archaeological empirical methods such as excavation and
building surveys as well as artefact recording and suggests that sometimes we
carry out our investigations just because that is what we are supposed to do.
But does it always bring something to our research In an article about the
role of contemporary archaeology or an archaeology of the present and
following discussion in ‘Surface assemblages: Towards an archaeology in and
of the present’ archaeologist Rodney Harrison (2011) suggests that the
connection between archaeology and excavation has become too accepted
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