Films, Floods, and Archaeology of the Contemporary World

This weekend, I watched the 30 minute video co-produced by Richard Rothaus and Adam Miedema. The video tells the story of the Sanford, Michigan which was the lakeside village devastated by the failure of the Sanford Dam and the resulting flood.

You can watch it here: 

The video shows dramatic footage of the devastation wrought by the dam’s failure and combines this with documentary style conversations with town residents. The drone footage of the now empty lakes effectively communicates the scale of the catastrophe and the personal conversations brings this disaster down to the human level. It’s a very effective (and affective) form of story telling. 

I suppose archaeologists (and anthropologists) have always found themselves drawn to time-based media such as film and audio recordings. Archaeology of the contemporary world seems particularly drawn to this kind of media especially as it becomes increasingly possible to capture the scale of events like the Sanford flood without abandoning the deeply human consequences of these situations. 

I wonder whether the emerging contemporary climate crisis will make archaeologists all the more interested in using visual and time-based media to attempt to capture the rate and scale of change. For example, I can’t help but think of Micah Bloom’s deeply archaeological approach to the flood in Minot. His Codex project documented the aftermath of 2011 Minot floods. Bloom used photographs of books and video of various efforts to navigate the fate of the flood ravaged community. His emphasis on books, for example, rather than people created (perhaps ironically) more deeply human level of engagement with the flood’s impact. Since books can be such personal and such intimate objects, they were a powerful surrogate for both the human impact of the flood and its effect on things.

You can go and check out Codex here.    

I’m intrigued to read Shannon Dawdy’s new book,American Afterlives: Reinventing Death in the Twenty-First Century which is a collaboration with the visual artist and filmmaker Daniel Zox. Zox also directed a documentary film that I think is designed to be a companion to the book and it can be watched here for $3.

I wonder how much the intersection of film and photography reflects both a growing interest in public archaeology and among artists, the recent rise to prominence of explicitly activist art. This creates a productive confluence especially as we consider how visual media will help us grasp challenges that operate on the fringe of the human imagination.