“Picking at the Scabs of Ancient Wounds”: The Derry Excavations Collection

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Taphonomy in Focus: Current Approaches to Site Formation and Social Stratigraphy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The “Derry Excavations Collection” (DEC) is a legacy collection recovered during a series of late 1970s salvage excavations conducted by archaeologist Brian Lacey in the city of Derry, Northern Ireland. This project focuses on a subset of artifacts associated with a seventeenth-century “town ditch” defensive feature used during the “Great Siege,” a pivotal episode in Derry’s history that has remained a social and historical lightning rod amid Protestant/Catholic and Unionist/Loyalist sectarian conflicts. Contemporary manifestations of these conflicts have also had a formative impact on the DEC itself, both in the circumstances surrounding its excavation as well as its subsequent management and storage. This project examines the layers of human activity and conflict in both the history reflected in the artifacts as well as the DEC’s tumultuous post-excavation “taphonomy.” Guided by the contents of the collection and a thorough documentary “excavation,” I interrogate how the improvisations demanded during emergency and conflict situations may produce atypical or “difficult” archaeological results that nonetheless reflect the complex web of social negotiations that guided their path from deposition to curation and may reveal a collection to be more than the sum of its material parts.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Taphonomy in Focus: Current Approaches to Site Formation and Social Stratigraphy   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 41642.0