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AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE IRON CURTAIN
to describe and understand a site, a series of objects, a larger landscape,
that is problematic in itself. Rather, it is when we believe that our own
experiences can tell us something about people’s experiences in the past
that it becomes problematic (Barret and Ko 2009:279). The use of phenomenology
within an archaeological framework should be seen as more
‘basic’ and bodily than this in that it is in the bodily encounter with the
material we investigate that it resides, not in our later reflection of it. As
Edgeworth suggests it is in our engagement with the materials that the
meaning of it is created (Edgeworth 2012:76) but still our interaction with
the sites that we investigate is rarely discussed in the reports later written.
The writing of Michael Polanyi Graves-Brown speaks of embodied
knowledge as a transaction between actors and materials as non-linear but
rather more in the form of constellations, “[e]mbodied knowledge is tacit
precisely because it exists as constellations, not narratives” (Graves-Brown
forthcoming) and as such it escapes words. “[W]e can know more than we
can tell” (Polanyi quoted in Graves-Brown, forthcoming). It is in this
direct interaction with the material, whether through excavations or other
interaction, that our engagement with it helps us create a knowledge of
what we study.
Several researchers have written about the way ruins affect us (Van
Reijen 1992, Edensor 2005a, Edensor 2005b, DeSilvey 2006, Andreassen et
al. 2010, Pétursdóttir and Olsen forthcoming, for an historic overview of the
subject see Woodward 2002). Something happens when people leave the
scene and the objects are allowed to take centre stage. In ethnologist
Susanne Wollinger’s description of a brigade in Sweden the things are nonexistent,
overshadowed by the humans that use them, walk amongst them
and depend upon them (Wollinger 2000, see Chapter 5). Andreassen et al.
note on their interaction with the former Soviet mining site of Pyramiden
that in a post-human state “[t]hings suddenly ‘appear’ to us in ways never
noticed previously, exposing some of their own unruly ‘thingness’”
(Andreassen et al. 2010:23). Pétursdottír (2012) lifts the importance of the
materials themselves, independent of our archaeological interpretation, and
it is often in the abandoned and the leftover that the things get a chance to
stand on their own, to be seen for what they are. DeSilvey has, in her studies
of a derelict homestead in Montana, shown how the decay of material, often
seen as something negative can ”be generative of a different kind of
knowledge” (DeSilvey 2006:323) letting ”other than-human agencies to
participate in the telling of stories about particular places” (DeSilvey
2006:318). In a similar way the objects and the ‘thingness’ of the decaying
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