"Hold Avstand": The Archaeology of and in the COVID-19 Pandemic in Tromsø, Norway

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Pandemic Fieldwork: Doing Fieldwork During a Pandemic" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Over the last few decades, archaeologists have turned more attention to studying material signatures of recent events including migration, homelessness, and the aftermaths of disasters. In March 2020, a group of contemporary archaeologists and anthropologists in Tromsø, Norway found themselves in the middle of one such disaster - the COVID-19 pandemic. What proceeded was a responsive, adaptive, and ethically reflexive study on the materiality of the pandemic. This paper presents the results of this work that observed personalized, variable, and at times contradictory individual material responses in the first two months of the pandemic before being replaced with standardized government and corporate-issued materials. The ephemerality of the former illustrates how state- and corporate-sanctioned materiality comes to dominate the material memory and, therefore, the narrative of the pandemic. This underpins the need for such responsive archaeological work as a form of salvage archaeology to preserve ephemeral traces to major events.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Pandemic Fieldwork: Doing Fieldwork During a Pandemic   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2021

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology