Prepping for The End: How Changing Fears Impacted the Use-lives of Fallout Shelters

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

People’s fears can have an impact on decision making, how people interact with their surroundings, and how they design structures. This is something important to consider when analyzing the archaeological record. The current study contributes to understanding how people’s fears impact construction and maintenance of architecture by examining Cold War fallout shelters from New York in the Albany area. In reaction to fears of the end of the world resulting from nuclear war, both private and public shelters were constructed for protection and in hopes of survival. Historical documents and what remains of the shelters can help us understand the many fears people were dealing with when shelters were built, how people were meant to interact in these spaces, and how fears and the spaces themselves changed as the Cold War went on and after it abated. This study has broader implications about how fear can be reflected in building design and potentially the archaeological record, and how changes in cultural fears alter how spaces are utilized as the focus of those fears shift towards new perceived threats.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40375.0