A speculative archaeology of excess: Exploring the afterlife of a derelict landscape garden

Abstract

This dissertation explores the contemporary archaeological record of Retiro, a derelict 19th-century landscape garden and summer estate located in the town of Molde on the north-western coast of Norway. The main topic that this thesis investigates is the consequences of acknowledging Retiro with its excess of unruly and apparently ruinous characteristics, as heritage. This involves focusing on the concrete characteristics of Retiro’s contemporary environment, from the garbage littering the forest floor to the plants that cover its undulating topography. An underlying motivation for this inquiry is to investigate an alternative, or more precisely, oblique way to approach and describe Retiro. This investigation is not founded on the ambition of improving conventional historical research or cultural heritage management, but instead explore a way of observing and including things that are usually overlooked in these ways of representing and handling the material past in the present. Thus, the goal is not to be reductive and instead focusing on expanding horizons based on on-site surveys. To do this the research relies on empirical observation and experience derived from repeated on-site surveys of Retiro.

One of the central conclusions of the research is that concern for material heritage sites like Retiro, through oblique and inclusive approaches, can be a foundation for an environmentally oriented archaeology of the contemporary world. This is by no means a revolutionary or radically new assertion, as archaeology has always in some form dealt with the environment; i.e. things that are not human or outside our control. Nevertheless, my hope is to demonstrate how archaeology can contribute to unique ways of describing a contemporary environment, on track with how other academic disciplines have contributed to the development of ecological and environmental studies in the humanities and social sciences. To achieve this, it is necessary to include the apparently natural and non-human aspects of heritage sites, and acknowledge that anthropogenic heritage is also partly constituted by – and exists in constant dialogue with – non-humans, like plants, fungi, and polypropylene. Our material legacies are not only inherited by humans, but also by non-humans. Importantly, a focus on these non-human aspects does not necessarily side-line human concerns. Rather, I argue, such focus serves to inform our understanding of how our heritage experience is formed and inform through the vibrant afterlife of the past.