Author: kostas.trimmis

It is day two of our socially distanced Archaeology of Pandemic project, and we split into three groups. Group One started researching the historical narrative of COVID-19, the most significant respiratory virus since the 1918 influenza pandemic, by establishing a timeline of UK-related events. The study combined World Health Organization key events from the first identification of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, its arrival in the UK ,and the following responses of the Government. We are now linking these to COVID-19-related material culture. Looking at non-pharmaceutical interventions of suppression and mitigation from Imperial College London’s COVID-19 response team, we have begun tying key events and data of death/case rates to material culture. This includes the demand for PPE, building of temporary hospitals, and changes in use of objects and buildings.

Groups Two and Three have developed heritage asset recording forms that work in conjunction with padlet boards. We are recording objects and buildings in line with Historic England’s guidelines annotating the four values of heritage: Evidential, Historic, Communal and Aesthetic. These can be anything that is viewed as significant in the material response during the imposed lockdown in the UK. The use of social media platforms like Twitter are helpful as they form dated threads, such as the ‘#DragonsHeartHospital’ from Cardiff. Via Padlet we are mapping objects, events, physical and digital sites that have been important or have changed meaning and use during the lockdown from the 28th March to the 1st June.

We have all been working from our homes while communicating via Slack, Google Docs and padlets, and we are using digital recourses to gather data and information as a base for our project. Today, in our daily 4pm meeting on Zoom, we discussed the different heritage interpretations of the ‘Shetland scrubs’ initiative and the communal, historical and aesthetic value of the manufacturing of facemarks. We also discussed the use of fieldwork for looking at ways buildings, such as retail and grocery shops, have been modified for social distancing to minimise the transmission of COVID-19.

You can follow our progress visiting our padlet map

 

Lydia Ropel

Second year Archaeology and Anthropology student

The Archaeology of Pandemic Project

Historic England in April 2020 launched an initiative to archive public pictures from the COVID-19 related lockdown. The ‘Picturing Lockdown Collection‘ aimed to archive images from the quarantine that has been applied across the UK to tackle the spread of the new Coronavirus. More than 3000 people contributed with images that show the impact that lockdown had on everyday lifeways. It is important that Historic England reacted rapidly to the temporality of the current events and tried to preserve the Heritage aspect, launching a community-based initiative. The collection is publicly available and can be accessed through this webspace. 

Here in Bristol, we believe that the disciplines of Archaeology and Anthropology should play a more active role studying the impact of the pandemic and helping to preserve the related tangible and intangible Heritage Assets. We advocate that archaeology is a tool to study past and present societies alike through their material print while the methods of anthropology enable us to document individual and collective thoughts in the contemporary. Thus, we decided to launch a two week ‘fieldwork’ programme that studies the material response to lockdown.

The ‘fieldwork’ is digital and socially distant! We are working from our homes, and in our neighbourhoods, tracing the objects and the buildings that have changed use, meaning, and/or importance during the lockdown. Alongside we are looking for objects that have been created specifically to battle the pandemic. We are also interested in seeing how the public interacts with these objects and buildings, and how active perceptions have changed during the different phases of the lockdown.

The idea of studying materially pandemics and quarantines is not novel, and relevant outputs can be observed from medieval plague burials in London to modern quarantine stations in New South Wales, Australia. Our aim is to identify the dynamics of the lockdown and how material cultures change meanings. In order to achieve these goals, we are recording objects (such as the Shetland Scrubs), buildings (such as the makeshift hospitals) and intra-landscapes (such as the arrangements for social distancing in shops).

We are using padlet boards to organise our research along with Slack and Zoom for team communications. We are following Historic England guidelines for the building and object recording, when the norms of ‘Object and Building Biographies’ are the theoretical baselines of our research. At the end, we aim to have a digital record of lockdown-related material culture and built heritage across the UK.

We will be posting daily updates in this blog about the project and its outcomes. So watch this space for the progress of the Archaeology of Pandemic Project’s digital fieldwork.

Dr Konstantinos Trimmis

Archaeology Technician and Associate Teacher