Global crises drastically alter human behavior, rapidly impacting patterns of movement and consumption. A rapid-response analysis of material culture brings new perspective to disasters as they unfold. We present a case study of the coronavirus pandemic in Tromsø, Norway, based on fieldwork from March 2020 to April 2021. Using a methodology rooted in social distancing and through systematic, diachronic, and spatial analysis of trash (e.g., discarded gloves, sanitization products), signage, and barriers, we show how material perspectives improve understanding of relationships between public action and government policy (in this case examined in relation to the Norwegian concept of collective labor, dugnad). We demonstrate that the materiality of individual, small-scale innovations and behaviors that typified the pandemic will have the lowest long-term visibility, as they are increasingly replaced or outnumbered by more durable representations generated by centralized state and corporate bodies that suggest close affinity between state directive and local action. We reflect on how the differential durability of material responses to COVID-19 will shape future memories of the crisis.

This article shows how to record current events from an archaeological perspective. With a case study from the COVID-19 pandemic in Norway, we provide accessible tools to document broad spatial and behavioral patterns through material culture as they emerge. Stressing the importance of ethical engagement with contemporary subjects, we adapt archaeological field methods—including geolocation, photography, and three-dimensional modeling—to analyze the changing relationships between materiality and human sociality through the crisis. Integrating data from four contributors, we suggest that this workflow may engage broader publics as anthropological data collectors to describe unexpected social phenomena. Contemporary archaeological perspectives, deployed in rapid response, provide alternative readings on the development of current events. In the presented case, we suggest that local ways of coping with the pandemic may be overshadowed by the materiality of large-scale corporate and state response.

Plant remains have long been a source of information about the distant past in archaeology, but are undertheorized or even overlooked in the field of contemporary archaeology. This article uses the example of a derelict nineteenth-century landscape garden in a town on the northwestern coast of Norway to show how novel insights about plants can be developed which acknowledge both their past and living present, without reducing them to colonizer, universal taxonomies or proxies for a human past.

No abstract