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6: AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE IRON CURTAIN
strength of these types of studies in their ability to provide different stories
that do not necessarily fit with our historical narratives but which instead
demonstrate an important other aspect of history. It also demonstrates the
problems that could appear from just relying on one type of source. Instead
we need to appreciate that all stories and fragments of history are important
even if they do not necessarily fit together.
The sites may seem more unusual to some than others. They will be
more familiar to those who have done military service, for example, than to
those who have not. For me and my preconceived ideas of the severity of
the Iron Curtain the clashes between the official and the private were quite
strong. For others who were once young men being trained as soldiers or
conscripted into military service, the clashes that I experienced in trying to
fit the pictures of the official line and the soldiers being and acting like
young lads may not be as strong. We all bring our preconceived ideas with
us into our research.
To go with the flow
To archaeologist Rodney Harrison (2011) the relationship between depth
and surface is a metaphor for the relationship between archaeology and
modernity. He claims that the metaphor of depth and stratigraphy creates a
distance between the present and the past. In contrast, he suggests that the
use of the metaphor surface instead draws the past and present together to
exist in the same time and space, a kind of surface assemblage. By referring
to Walter Benjamin’s ‘Jetztzeit’, ‘now-time’, Harrison suggests that we are
“no longer dealing with a historical present, but a series of localized and
hence spatialized presents and pasts that are generated by the relationships
between the particular people and things contained within them” (Harrison
2011:183). In her studies of an entertainment complex in the Japanese city
of Osaka social scientist Albena Yaneva emphasises the importance of Actor
Network Theory (ANT) for the idea of surface assemblage as it studies
“assemblages of humans and non-humans jumbled together in the present”
and that “ANT methodologies can help to create a space in which the past,
present and future are combined and are still in the process of becoming”
(Yaneva 2013:25 emphasis in original).
This is not an ANT study. There are many points where I am too far
from an ANT perspective, maybe most fundamentally as the perspective I
have used when taking on this material is from myself, my body. The way
that objects impact upon each other is less explored. In this sense one can
say that I hold an anthropocentric perspective that is not compatible with
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