Null Heritage and 20th-Century Archaeology as an Excluded Curriculum

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.

20th-century municipal dumps and even informal, community refuse dumps seem to fit ambiguously when we apply our values to sort significant and non-significant archaeological resources. This activity of gathering refuse for landfill or disposal produces a variety of 20th-century sites that it is easy for regulators to exclude from significant heritage: a null heritage that invites discussion of the transparency of certain kinds of contemporary contexts to cultural resource management processes, and the potential to mask some histories. Many other types of archaeological resources with 20th-century associations receive this treatment, in part because they are distinct to modern contexts. Educator Elliot Eisner (1933-2014) used the idea of a “null curriculum” to describe the importance of what is not being taught, the omissions and outright exclusions that merit attention equal to what is included. This paper approaches the exclusions that task how we make a functional heritage of recent archaeological sites.

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