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Accepted Paper:

Archaeological Imaginaries and Erasures: photographing the Great Northern Coalfield  
Oscar Aldred (Newcastle University)

Paper short abstract:

This paper is based on a collaborative project called Imaginaries and Erasure in the Great Northern Coalfield. In this paper we will explore our research by addressing the specific way that Imagination and Erasure interact with one another when viewed through an archaeological lens.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on a project called Imaginaries and Erasure in the Great Northern Coalfield that explores the visible cultural legacies of post-industrial reclamation, specifically located in coalfields of Northumberland and County Durham. Photography is used to investigate change in the landscape, specifically the erasure of the surface evidence of coal mining, but also the diverse results of the land reclamation process itself. While large scale extractive industry has evident consequences which are often construed as a traumatic disruption of the landscape, we suggest that the closure of industry is often discussed in terms of the distressing effects it has upon those put out of work, their families and their communities. What has happened to former industrial land is less often discussed, and we suggest that reclamation can, in some circumstances, be considered as a further trauma, severing individuals and communities from reminders of their pasts. We recognise that photography can never be a neutral recording tool. In our research we ask how economic and policy factors have combined with preconceived aesthetic ideals to shape the post-industrial landscape and in what ways these factors can be made visible through photography? Photography has the potential, through what Walter Benjamin referred to as the 'optical unconscious', not just to record but also to reveal qualities that might otherwise remain hidden. This 'affect' is integral to the archaeological process too. This paper examines the specific way that Imagination and Erasure interact with one another when viewed through an archaeological lens.

Panel P30
Archaeology and Photography
  Session 1