Internet Archaeology (Mar 2024)
Finding the Wrong People. Challenges of contemporary archaeology in Poland
Abstract
The immediate past has been of interest within Polish archaeology only very recently. Research was first undertaken in 1967 and was incidental, tending not to change the general view of archaeologists focused on periods spanning prehistory to the Middle Ages, and then gradually adding the 17th and 18th centuries. A permanent change came in the 1990s with the emergence of development-led archaeology in Poland. Excavations preceding construction of motorways and other infrastructure projects revealed relics dating back to 1800-1945 on an unprecedented scale. Initially, insufficient historical knowledge made archaeological research particularly difficult. Now, after a few decades, this pioneer era is coming to an end, and there are archaeologists focusing mainly on the contemporary period e.g. archaeology of armed conflicts in the broadest sense of the term or narrowly specialised forensic archaeology. Nevertheless, the challenges of contemporary archaeology still exist. They are related to the key heritage management issues and significant consequences (including financial consequences) of resulting administrative decisions with regard to archaeological heritage of the 18th-20th centuries. In this article, individual challenges are discussed with regard to archaeology and memory, systems of heritage protection as well as preservation and research. Selected case studies are used to illustrate them all. The omission of time boundaries in binding legal definitions of both monuments and archaeological monuments is perfectly fine, because this ensures that all the relatively new relics are, in theory, as protected as older ones regardless of their state of preservation. However, in practice, archaeological research of a 19th-20th century site can cause confusion, from the first application for a research permit up to choosing a storage facility for the finds and their proper permanent curation. In order to go beyond the state-of-the-art in Poland, this article presents several solutions consistent with the existing legal framework. However, a uniform approach is still to be developed, even within the archaeological community.
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