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6: AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE IRON CURTAIN<br />
strength of these types of studies in their ability to provide different stories<br />
that do not necessarily fit with our historical narratives but which instead<br />
demonstrate an important other aspect of history. It also demonstrates the<br />
problems that could appear from just relying on one type of source. Instead<br />
we need to appreciate that all stories and fragments of history are important<br />
even if they do not necessarily fit together.<br />
The sites may seem more unusual to some than others. They will be<br />
more familiar to those who have done military service, for example, than to<br />
those who have not. For me and my preconceived ideas of the severity of<br />
the Iron Curtain the clashes between the official and the private were quite<br />
strong. For others who were once young men being trained as soldiers or<br />
conscripted into military service, the clashes that I experienced in trying to<br />
fit the pictures of the official line and the soldiers being and acting like<br />
young lads may not be as strong. We all bring our preconceived ideas with<br />
us into our research.<br />
To go with the flow<br />
To archaeologist Rodney Harrison (2011) the relationship between depth<br />
and surface is a metaphor for the relationship between archaeology and<br />
modernity. He claims that the metaphor of depth and stratigraphy creates a<br />
distance between the present and the past. In contrast, he suggests that the<br />
use of the metaphor surface instead draws the past and present together to<br />
exist in the same time and space, a kind of surface assemblage. By referring<br />
to Walter Benjamin’s ‘Jetztzeit’, ‘now-time’, Harrison suggests that we are<br />
“no longer dealing with a historical present, but a series of localized and<br />
hence spatialized presents and pasts that are generated by the relationships<br />
between the particular people and things contained within them” (Harrison<br />
2011:183). In her studies of an entertainment complex in the Japanese city<br />
of Osaka social scientist Albena Yaneva emphasises the importance of Actor<br />
Network Theory (ANT) for the idea of surface assemblage as it studies<br />
“assemblages of humans and non-humans jumbled together in the present”<br />
and that “ANT methodologies can help to create a space in which the past,<br />
present and future are combined and are still in the process of becoming”<br />
(Yaneva 2013:25 emphasis in original).<br />
This is not an ANT study. There are many points where I am too far<br />
from an ANT perspective, maybe most fundamentally as the perspective I<br />
have used when taking on this material is from myself, my body. The way<br />
that objects impact upon each other is less explored. In this sense one can<br />
say that I hold an anthropocentric perspective that is not compatible with<br />
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