Healing Trauma through Heritage Making: Perspectives from COVID-19

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Conceptual and Ethical Limits of Heritage in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Through a contemporary archaeology of the COVID-19 pandemic, we attempt to dissect practices of commemoration, remembrance, and memory, which are linked to the process of heritage making through anthropological archaeology methodologies. The global pandemic poses some opportunities and challenges to archaeologists. On the one hand, it provides us a setting in which connections and responses to a global phenomenon unfold before our eyes, unveiling the minutiae of behavioral responses to it that could not be assessed otherwise. On the other, it prompts us to reflect on how our contemporary material past is understood and approached. What happens when heritage is not an exploitable/profitable resource? Is it even heritage? What about all the material culture that is being produced, most of which is ephemeral and won’t last enough to be thought of as heritage. Will it produce places of commemoration or places of memory/heritage? We address these questions based on our ongoing documentation of and experience with different material expressions of the pandemic in cities of the USA and Chile. In an attempt to provide a nuanced understanding of heritage that could defy the legal and economic aspects of the heritage machine, we explore the healing and deliberating aspects of it.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Conceptual and Ethical Limits of Heritage in Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33444