In an era of rising authoritarian and anti-democratic movements globally, participatory archaeology needs to move beyond self-congratulatory ideas about its inherent goodness and take seriously archaeologists’ potential role as social and political mediators in a complex democratic discourse. The challenge lies in resisting both external and internal pressure on democratic discourse, while maintaining an inclusive, democratic and multivocal debate about heritage, identity and belonging. Drawing on experiences from Indigenous and particularly Saami archaeology, participatory archaeology in Scandinavia can become more self-reflexive and purposeful. Our subject’s strength is that it provides specified and tangible topics and arenas for democratic discourse, building social cohesion by discussing and tolerating diverse perspectives. The aim should not be consensus about heritage and the past but dissensus and communities of disagreement. Such an approach contributes to a cognitive heritage preparedness that transgresses the preservation of predefined physical heritage values, constituting a ‘small win’ to the ‘wicked problem’ of sustaining open, accountable and transparent discussions in the face of totalitarian narratives and aggressive “alternative facts”.
This paper presents two Danish examples from the Funnel Beaker Culture illustrating a practice of depositing antique elements – in this case elk bones. While faunal remains are a well-known aspect of complex Neolithic deposition practices, the scope and nuances of these depositional practices remain unclear, partly due to a general lack of 14C dates and detailed zooarchaeological analysis. One key outcome of an increased focus on Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) dating is the identification of deposited antiques. Although the concept of antiques in archaeological contexts is not new, it has rarely been discussed in Neolithic contexts, despite its relevance to theories of social memory and mnemonic materiality. Recognizing the phenomenon of deposited antique animal remains requires both archaeological openness to the idea and sufficient 14C dating. The two examples discussed here – both involving Maglemosian Elk bones found together with Neolithic domesticated animals – were discovered in wetland contexts in North Zealand, Denmark. Together, they highlight the potential of direct AMS dating in revealing previously unrecognized practices of temporal reuse, as well as shedding new light on Neolithic engagements with time, materiality, and memory.
As the practice and business of personal DNA ancestry testing continue to expand globally, understanding people’s interest in their genetic history, and how the results influence attitudes about the past, is being called for. Such insight is especially relevant to archaeologists and heritage researchers. Yet the motivations for taking direct-to-consumer DNA tests and their effects remain poorly understood in a European context. This paper presents the results of a nationwide survey carried out by The Centre for Critical Heritage Studies, University of Gothenburg, in collaboration with the Swedish Society for Genetic Genealogy. The aim was to identify social and cultural attitudes among people who decided to take a personal DNA test in Sweden. Nearly 900 individuals answered the survey. Based on the results, we identify a distinction between family genealogies and personal genetic history versus national history and collective identity. While the majority of respondents are interested in history and archaeology, their interest in family genealogies is specifically linked to individual stories and possible links to existing/unknown family members. This suggests that DNA-testing provides a new and different take on family histories compared to historically-documented genealogies. It also suggests that the link to polarizing debates on ethnonational belonging, highlighted in relation to public responses to ancient DNA studies in archaeology, remains muted as regards personal DNA tests.
In 1944, the German Luftwaffe established a regional headquarters in occupied Denmark, located in the forest area of Dyrehaven, Skanderborg. The Wehrmacht cleared the Sølund Psychiatric Institution and constructed bunkers, barracks, trenches, weapons depots and vehicle sites. After Germany’s surrender in 1945, these barracks were repurposed as a refugee camp for German civilians – mainly women and children – fleeing the collapsing Reich. While the German occupation has long attracted scholarly attention, the postwar refugees have largely fallen into oblivion. Whether this is because they were defeated, poor, women, children, or considered to be ‘victims’, their history has only recently begun to resurface. In parallel to historical research, archaeological investigations now aim to recover this hidden narrative of German postwar refugees in Denmark. This article presents the 2022 archaeological excavations at the former Sølund camp, assessing the potential of observing the change of power behind the barbed wire of the camp through an exploration of materiality. Since the physical traces of the soldiers are far more prominent than those of the refugees – and given the lack of ‘uncontaminated’ contexts or structures used by refugees only – this research argues for a reflexive archaeological approach in order to access the experiences of the displaced inhabitants who lived at Sølund camp.
