Disrupting Time Post-Disaster: Using Speculative Archaeology as Restorative Justice in Contemporary Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Critical Issues in Contemporary Archaeology & Historical Archaeology: Limits, Opportunities, Challenges", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Contemporary archaeology and speculative fiction merge reality and possibility, allowing one to time travel from living in present inequities to imagining more equitable futures. Combining this with disaster archaeology allows a critical lens on the notion of returning to a past time period, the “back to normal” aspect that most recovery efforts focus on. For so many, “normal” is not an ideal state to return to. As an archaeologist working within these scenarios, I ask: How can contemporary archaeology embrace the tenets of the speculative to defamiliarize us with what normal is? Building on my work from various field sectors, I turn to what I feel is archaeology’s greatest gift, storytelling – using the speculative and building on it through fiction, ethnography, and, more recently, heritage. This approach offers a hopeful and inspiring way to use interpretation to embody a present and imagine a future that dismantles these structural inequities.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Critical Issues in Contemporary Archaeology & Historical Archaeology: Limits, Opportunities, Challenges   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow