Three Things Thursday: Dark Heritage, Sports, and Funding Archaeology
- Oct 13, 2022
- 4 min read
For a long time, I resisted the idea that Thursdays were the new Fridays. After all, I still got up and went to work on Fridays so Thursdays just seemed like Thursdays to me. In fact, Fridays and Wednesdays also often seemed like Thursdays too. Thursdays are weird that way.
Recently, however, I’ve started to feel more and more relieved when I make it to Thursday evening (or even Thursday morning) knowing that most of week is behind me and I just need to keep doing what I’m doing and I should be able to bring myself in for a successful landing.
In the spirit of that, I offer a few musings on this unapologetically random Three Things Thursday.
Thing the First
A couple people on my social media feeds posted links to an article by Suzie Thomas titled ““Dark” Heritage? Nudging the Discussion” from Heritage & Society. (H/t to Morag Kersel for sending along a copy of this article!).
I’m generally drawn to discussion of dark tourism and dark heritage partly because of my work in the Bakken Oil Patch for which my colleague Bret Weber and I produced a tourist guide. I remain pretty proud of this book particularly because I feel like it was one of the few times when I put my penchant for more experimental ways of thinking or talking about the landscape into something as substantial as a peer reviewed book.
One of the things that emerged from my efforts in this book is a more expansive view of both tourism and heritage. Thomas’s article on Dark Heritage and its association with violence focused on attitudes toward World War II remains in Finnish Lapland. We need not associate violence exclusively with warfare, however, and as we become more and more aware of the violence associated with climate change in the 21st century, it is tempting to expand the concept of “Dark” Heritage to encompass heritage associated with the slow violence of climate change on a global level.
In this context, then, perhaps our work in the Bakken represents a tentative step toward a “Dark” Heritage of the Anthropocene. When we consider this in relation to the emerging discipline of the archaeology of the contemporary world, it becomes hard to escape both the collapse of perspectives offered by both the study of heritage and archaeology, and the suffusing of this muddied discipline with concerns for various forms of violence on the global scale. The archaeology of areas like the Bakken contribute directly to how we understand the process and violence of global climate change on a local level
Thing the Second
It’s baseball season and it’s also politics season with both the playoffs underway and the midterm elections looming. This has gotten me thinking about how the two situations leverage our partisan attitudes and world views to intensify the experiences. For sports fans and voters, the outcome of a particular election or series represents the confirmation of a particular understanding of the world. At its best, these scenarios become classic conflicts of good versus evil; at their worst, a political victory by our opponents challenges our faith in human goodness in the same way that a victory by the Mets would.
As I mulled the parallels between political and sporting partisans, I thought back to Robert Coover’s book, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., which I read a few years ago and very much enjoyed. The set up for the novel is J. Henry Waugh created a fictional baseball league whose outcomes and game play were based on dice throws. Henry had played the game for over 50 seasons and had become quite attached to the finely crafted reality that this league embodied. This all broke down, however, when a rising star was struck and killed by a hit ball. This was not only a profoundly unexpected outcome, but one that caused Henry’s fantasy world of the Universal Baseball Association and real world of his career, personal relationships, and daily life blur in ways that make the reader more and more uneasy.
It’s really a remarkable book that offers particularly compelling insights into our contemporary political situation. As the finely crafted worlds of political partisans and pundits have become increasingly vouchsafed by the statistical realities of the ballot box, many people are finding it harder and harder to discern the difference between the world that politics creates and the world in which we have to live day to day.
As a commentary on this, I’ve started to think about creating a website that celebrates the victories of my favorite teams. Rather than following the action in the NBA or the NFL with an eye toward the real outcomes of games, I would create a narrative where readers could follow a teams ups and down confident in the knowledge that their team will prevail in the end.
Thing the Third
Finally, as readers of this blog invariably know, it is becoming more and more challenging to generate funding to support archaeological work both for US based projects and on a global scale. As a result, scholars are turning to unconventional and innovative ways to generate the funds needed both to study the past, but also to ensure that students have a chance to learn about the discipline of archaeology and places, people, and communities that it studies and benefits.
Along these lines, check out the innovative work done by The Boğsak Center for Archaeology and Heritage in Rough Cilicia. They’re doing good, but hard grassroots archaeological development focused (appropriately enough) on quarries in this region and they’re looking for donations to allow them to continue to document, study, and present their work.
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