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AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE IRON CURTAIN
how it fits in with other sources, new insights can be made. This was
especially true for the physical materials I encountered. I wrote in the
introduction chapter that to an archaeologist it should not come as a surprise
how important the materials are for how we view history but it still
did. Considering that materials are the main source of information for an
archaeologist and that it has always been at the heart of this study that may
sound ludicrous. But still here I am at the end of the study surprised at the
materials’ ability to act and interact.
When dealing with a history close to our own there are often more sources
available for information than when we are dealing with earlier archaeological
periods. Archaeologist Anders Andrén discuss what he calls the dilemma of
the in-betweeness, created by the specialisation within modern science and
means that archaeology of historical periods can find itself in an ambivalent
space between material culture and text. He suggests that we have to acknowledge
that they are part of two different discourses and although we should
attempt to decrease the distance between them we will not solve the problem
by seeing objects and texts as the same thing (Andrén 1998:14). Instead we
need to approach the material across the disciplines through methodological
discussions. Often discussions regarding different sources concentrate on
contradictions between them and if one story is more correct than another. In
other cases it is the many stories or angles of an event, a period or a place that
are in focus and the sources certainly do tell different stories. Within my
research, for example, this could be discussed through: the archives from East
and West showing official documents from governments with different
ideological views; the oral accounts of people who have had very different
experiences of the border, as well as the material which often has been altered
after its use as a militarised border. When dealing with material from the 20 th
and 21 st century it is, however, not enough to discuss the sources from just the
discourses around materiality and text. In my research I have had to deal with
both objects and texts but also other sources such as film, news reports, oral
accounts, song lyrics and art. All these sources are important in the understanding
of the materials that we encounter today and need to be recognized.
It is also clear from my fieldwork that it is very difficult to define these
different sources in order to fit them into a source category. Is writing on a
wall a text or material How do we classify a memory awakened by an object
or a photo accompanied by an oral account Although they may be ontologically
different in their makeup they are still all sources that face us as we
approach our material. At times they require different methods but at times
they appear surprisingly similar. If anything they demonstrate the different
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