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AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE IRON CURTAIN<br />

and heritage categories trickling down from the top I hope to get a better<br />

understanding of how the material of the past is created at these sites.<br />

A large part of my fieldwork has been carried out in what can be called a<br />

walkover survey. Walkover survey is defined by English Heritage’s National<br />

Monuments Records Thesaurus as “A planned programme of investigation<br />

conducted within a defined area aimed at identifying and surveying<br />

previously unrecorded sites and checking the condition of known sites”<br />

(NMR Website). Similarly to this definition my investigation was carried<br />

out to identify and record remains of the former militarised border and its<br />

infrastructure that still remain in the border landscapes today. These<br />

investigations can also be considered a kind of observation. As the walkover<br />

surveys worked as a way to investigate what the border areas look like today<br />

and also how these areas are used in the present my own observations<br />

became very important. The researcher’s own influence on the material that<br />

is studied is, of course, nothing new. Whether we are conscious of it or not,<br />

we are always part of the results that we produce. Within archaeology there<br />

has been an increased focus on the reflexive since the 1990s, in particular<br />

through the work of archaeologist Ian Hodder who has written extensively<br />

on the subject and applied a more reflexive methodology at excavations at<br />

Çatalhöyük (Hodder 1997, 1999, 2000, 2003). Also involved in this research<br />

at Çatalhöyük as well as applying a reflexive methodology at the Citytunnel<br />

Project in Malmö, Sweden is archaeologist Åsa Berggren (2001, 2002,<br />

Berggren and Hodder 2000, 2003). Berggren points out that although reflexivity<br />

made a relatively late entrance on the archaeological scene it has been<br />

part of other fields such as sociology, anthropology and philosophy for<br />

longer (Berggren 2002:22). To put it simply one can say that reflexivity is<br />

about making the process of interpretation as clear as possible. To be<br />

reflexive means that we are aware that our thoughts and the choices that we<br />

make are affecting the results we get and that we as researchers have an<br />

impact on the material that we study. In this thesis I have tried to be as open<br />

as possible about the different stages I have gone through and about the<br />

development of the thought process in order to be as transparent as possible<br />

in the production of this text.<br />

Everyone makes observations but there is a distinction in using observations<br />

in a research capacity. Ethnologists Gösta Arvastson and Billy Ehn<br />

make a distinction between the everyday observations that we make as<br />

humans, an action that they claim is essential to being part of society, and<br />

the scientific observations that are part of the ethnographic method. They<br />

claim that the difference mainly lies in the reflexive nature of the latter<br />

20

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