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AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE IRON CURTAIN
sometimes mix and intertwine, sometimes stand on their own. As individual
pieces they have their own value, their own story. Sometimes they
hook onto each other and create something bigger, something that reaches
further, and sometimes they do not. What is important is to not force them
into a bigger picture or chronology, to lose track of their individual voice,
whatever language they may speak, and to allow ourselves to follow their
paths and see where it takes us.
My emphasis on seeing beyond the narrative should not be seen as a way
to completely move away from it. Narratives have important functions
within the way we write our history. One of the most basic roles of a narrative
is to create order and help us organise the information at hand.
Chapters 3–5 in this thesis all start with a historical background, all written
in a highly narrative style. When we look at the material the narratives can
help us understand what we are looking at and to understand why, for
example, a fence was changed or removed at a certain point. Narratives are
also important as they are a well-established way of writing history and as
we have seen in my research, especially in Slovenia, a way for people to
connect to others and other people’s history. What is important is not to
expect to find all the answers in the narrative, or to exclude material that
does not fit with it and to be aware that there can be different motives
behind using one particular narrative instead of another.
The experience of things
In 2012 I posted a question on the Contemporary and Historical Archaeology
in Theory (CHAT) discussion list asking about walkover surveys
(McWilliams 2012). This is a term that is used regularly in archaeological
reports, articles and texts, but there are no real descriptions or definition of
what these entail. I was curious as to what people considered them to be. An
array of answers demonstrated that people had very different views, not only
of what a walkover survey is but also in the confidence shown in these types
of surveys. For many they were just a first step ahead of excavation. Archaeologist
Paul Graves-Brown picked up the question and brought it into his
presentation “Wandering about” at the 2012 CHAT conference in York and
comments on that there is no formal methodology more than English
Heritage’s reference to reconnaissance as a Level 1 survey seen as a preliminary
step ahead of other investigations (English Heritage 2007:3, Graves-
Brown 2012:1). But according to Graves-Brown, since excavation is often not
the primary approach in contemporary archaeology “walking around is not a
preliminary step; it is the methodology” (Graves-Brown 2012:1 emphasis in
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