How to Record Current Events like an Archaeologist

Abstract

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.

Material Culture Studies in the Age of Big Data: Digital Excavation of Homemade Face-Mask Production during the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…This article relied on a marketing tool to scrape relatively small datasets manually. We anticipate, however, an outgrowth of methods to analyze diverse subjects with greater temporal and spatial precision, including events as they occur and in their aftermath (see also Magnani et al 2021). Growing internet archives, coupled with machine learning techniques for parsing them, will provide new materials to approach events not just as they unfold but long after the fact.…”

“…Through their own experiences of the pandemic, Angelo and colleagues (2021) established archaeological practice as means of coping with broadly experienced social upheaval (Camp et al 2022). Others explored the intersections of state sovereignty and the memorialization of the crisis through material culture (Magnani et al 2021, 2022). Schofield and colleagues (2021) considered the deleterious impacts of pandemic waste and its rapid influx into global ecosystems.…”

The Fundamentals of the State

“…States also create and endorse the financial webs that imbue even the most banal of transactions with a sense of purpose for both providers and purchasers, whether through the creation of banking regulations, official mints, price controls, subsidies, or even the national lottery (the lottery being the most telling instance of all as an example of the promise of state help through individual buy-in; see, e.g., Casey 2006, Schmidt 2019. The effective dissemination of state-level authority through written directives can be extremely rapid, as noted in the assessment by Magnani et al (2021) of the COVID-19 pandemic; utilizing observations from a remote region of Norway, the authors illustrate how localized responses were soon superseded by the programmatic responses of the state, which are materially likely to be more evident precisely because they are more ubiquitous and standardized even during a crisis of novel conditions.…”

Memories of COVID-19: The Types of Fitted Face Masks Between Public Health Advice and Personal Choice

“…This could be achieved through observational studies of face mask use [24], assessments of lost and discarded [14,25] as well as donated masks [13], and through a documentation of the longer-term fate of discarded single-use face masks in the urban and peri-urban environment [15,16,26]. While the majority of mainstream research focused on the environmental aspects of discarded masks [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40], several authors have conducted work on masks in the social acceptability [41][42][43][44][45] and the future heritage space [46][47][48][49][50]. Now, three years after COVID-19 first became a global health emergency, the majority of people have 'learned to live with the virus' [51,52] with the majority of people, at least in the more affluent countries, being fully vaccinated.…”