Cataloguing the Material Culture of Police Violence in Portland, Oregon

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology, Activism, and Protest", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In this paper I will discuss the artifacts, digital data, and community relationships accumulated over three years of documenting police violence against protestors in my local community. Over the course of this project I have become expert at identifying chemical weapons parts, have learned to safely store explosive objects outside of traditional institutional settings, and have been called upon to provide material to support legal action brought by people harmed by use of "less than lethal" weapons throughout my region. Cataloguing these contemporary historically significant artifacts was eye-opening in itself, but equally so has been the way this role has helped me establish parasocial relationships with people as I help them to understand their own traumatic experiences through community-based archaeological practice.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• Archaeology, Activism, and Protest

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow