Season 04 - Episode 04: Archaeological Identities - Part Two
This episode is the second of a three-part series produced by Eleanor Neil, contributing editor at American Anthropologist and Anthropological Airwaves. From the African American Burial Ground in New York City to the memorialization of violence in Northern Ireland to professional archaeology in the eastern Mediterranean, Eleanor asks archaeologists with different regional and methodological specialties to choose a single object or site, and, in their own words describe how this this site or artefact speaks to the interaction between archaeology and political or social identity across time and place. In this episode, Dr. Laura McAtackney, discusses the materiality of violence and partition, the nature of commemoration and how archaeology of the recent past has an integral role in our understandings of politics, society and conflict.
Dr. McAtackney is an associate professor at Aarhus University and her research centres on the historical and contemporary archaeologies of institutions and colonialism in Ireland.
FURTHER READING:
Flanagan, Eimear. “McGurk’s Bar Bombing: I just want justice for my grandparents.” BBC News: Northern Ireland, 12 December 2021. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-59569348/.
McAtackney, Laura. “Materials and Memory: Archaeology and Heritage as Tools of Transitional Justice at a Former Magdalen Laundry.” Éire-Ireland 55, nos. 1 & 2, (Spring/Summer 2020): 223-246.
MacAirt, Ciarán. "Corporate memory and the McGurk's Bar Massacre: Ciarán MacAirt writes about the murder of his grandmother and 14 other civilians in a Belfast bar 43 years ago, and the families’ on-going campaign for truth." Criminal Justice Matters 98, no. 1 (2014): 6-7.
Justice for Magdalenes Research, an online resource associated with the NGO, Justice for Magdalenes. http://jfmresearch.com/aboutjfmr/
TRANSCRIPT:
SPEAKERS
Eleanor Neil, Laura McAtackney, Anar Parikh
Anar Parikh 00:00
Anthropological Airwaves is the official podcast of the journal American Anthropologist, whose main offices are located on the traditional and ancestral territories of the Nacotchank, Anacostia, and Piscataway peoples. The Anacostia and Potomac rivers have long been places of trade and gathering for Indigenous peoples, and Washington DC is now home to diverse Indigenous people from across Turtle Island. American Anthropologist has published material throughout its history that has taken knowledge from Indigenous peoples for a scholarly audience and has not required its authors or editors to be good relations to Indigenous peoples and communities. Acknowledging territory is only one step in repairing these relationships. The Editorial Collective of the journal is committed to deep listening and engagement with Indigenous scholars, peoples, and communities to explore ways to be a better relation.
[intro music]
Anar Parikh 01:06
Hey y’all! Thanks for joining us for another episode of Anthropological Airwaves – the official podcast of the journal, American Anthropologist. This is Season Four, Episode Four: Archaeological Identities - Part 2.
Anar Parikh 01:22
My name is Anar Parikh. Some of y’all might be familiar with my voice by now, but in case we haven’t had the chance to be acquainted yet, I’m the Associate Editor of the Podcast at American Anthropologist and the Executive Producer of Anthropological Airwaves.
Anar Parikh 01:37
If you listened to last month’s episode, you know that Eleanor Neil, a PhD candidate in the Classics Department at Trinity College, in Dublin, is taking over the mic for the next couple of episodes. As a part of her tenure as a Contributing Editor at Anthropological Airwaves and American Anthropologist, Eleanor has developed a collection of three episodes titled, “Archaeological Identities,” to explore how archaeology informs and forms contemporary social and political dialogues. From the African American Burial Ground in New York City to the memorialization of violence in Northern Ireland to professional archaeology in the eastern Mediterranean, Eleanor asks archaeologists with different regional and methodological specialties to choose a single object or site, and, in their own words describe how this this site or artefact speaks to the interaction between archaeology and political or social identity across time and place. With each episode, Eleanor has also curated a list of additional readings for listeners who are interested in learning more. We’ll link to these readings in the show notes and include them on the episode transcript, which, as always, you can find on the Anthropological Airwaves page of the American Anthropologist website!
Anar Parikh 02:56
Each of the three episodes are threaded together by an overarching theme, but they are also meant to stand alone! If you haven’t listened to last month’s episode featuring Dr. Cheryl Janifer LaRoche on the African American Burial Ground in New York City, that’s okay! But do be sure to check it out after this one! It’s very good! And with that, I’ll turn it over to Eleanor to introduce today’s episode!
[Westlin’ Winds by Eoin O’Donnell]
Eleanor Neil 03:33
Welcome to "Archeological Identities." My name is Eleanor Neil. I'm a Contributing Editor at American Anthropologist and Anthro Airwaves. In many ways, archaeology is as much about the time in which it is being undertaken, as it is about the past which it is exploring. In this three-part podcast, archaeologists will be discussing the ways in which contemporary social and political discourse influence our understanding of archaeological phenomena, as well as the influence of the archaeological past on these contemporary discourses. Intrinsic to these discussions is the role archaeology plays in the creation, recreation, affirmation and solidification of personal and cultural identity.
Eleanor Neil 04:17
In this episode, Dr. Laura McAtackney will discuss the memorialization of a pub bombing in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The bombing occurred in 1971, killing 15 people, one of the highest casualty rates of any bombing during the Troubles. The Troubles is the name given to the inter-communal violence that plagued Ireland, especially Northern Ireland, which remains part of Great Britain, from the 1960s to 1998. The conflict was between the primarily Catholic national Republican movement, armed aspect of which was the IRA or Irish Republican Army and the primarily Protestant Unionists. The violence was ostensibly brought to an end in 1998, with a multilateral agreement known as the Good Friday Agreement.
Eleanor Neil 04:57
After the agreement was signed, there was a proliferation of what are called peace walls. These are walls that can be up to 25 feet high and are designed to keep the two community separate. The first ones were erected in the 1920s but they increased in number and height after 1998 and while they are found throughout Northern Ireland, the majority are in Belfast. These walls and the murals and graffiti that adorn them are important parts of the urban landscape of Belfast. Dr. McAtackney has also written about and mentions in this episode, the Magdalene Laundries which were institutions run primarily by Catholic orders of nuns, which were promoted as refuges for women, but are infamous for in fact being sites of incarceration, forced labor and abuse. Dr. McAtackney's discussion throughout this episode goes beyond traditional understandings of what archaeology is and can be demonstrating the role that has not just in understanding the past, but communicating and interacting with it.
[Irish folk music]
Dr. Laura McAtackney 06:00
Hi, so my name is Laura McAtackney. I'm an associate professor in sustainable heritage management, which is a bit of a convoluted title. But I mainly teach heritage and contemporary archaeology at Aarhus University in Denmark.
[Westlin' Winds by Eoin O'Donnell]
[Irish folk music]
Dr. Laura McAtackney 06:42
So one of the things I was thinking about is how there's a connection between the deliberate remembrance of some things and enduring injustices, a rising tide, they haven't been resolved, and one of those is McGurk's bar. So McGurk's bar was a bar in a working class nationalist area, which is just outside the city center on the verges of North Belfast, at the corner of Great George's Street and North Queen Street, which are two roads, which have a long history in the city and also obviously have quite imperial kind of names. This is a kind of a lot of naming conventions in Belfast are very much connected to the British state. So this pub bombing happened in the fourth of December 1971. It was one of the earliest mass bombings of the troubles and one of the ones that had the most impact, particularly in terms of people who were killed. It was a no warning bonb and a 50 pound bomb. So quite a big one. And 15 people died at the scene and 13 were injured. And it was considered at the time by the security forces and some of the media as potentially an IRA bomb that had prematurely exploded, because they considered that this pub might have been the type of place that people who were in the IRA, which is obviously a Republican organization, um might have frequented, which is one of the kind of lingering injustices that kind of tie in to the the families and survivors because they were kind of blamed for their own deaths and for the deaths of their families. And that slur kind of stayed for a long time. And it's one of the reasons why I think the memory of that bombing also has been retained for a long time. Like often these places did have a kind of gendered aspect to them. So often women were seen as being more of behind closed doors and men were more involved in the conflict, and actually that differed a little bit between the different communities that there was definitely seen as women having more of a kind of upfront role in the Republican movement and there was in the loyalist movement. And I think that probably reflects the politics, the kind of underlying politics of them as well. I think one of the things that comes out a lot, I actually read a lot of the newspapers around the time as well, just to see how it was reported. And what comes out a lot is the kinds of stories connected to women and children, I think, create a lot more sympathy from a kind of public focus. So I think that also has tied into how McGurk's is remembered if it was only men who died, not I think there would be a bit more ooh suspicion about who those men were and why there was just like a certain type of man and the bar. But actually, a lot of the people who died were older, you know, couples who were quite old or young children, and also the, the mother and daughter of who owned the bar died in the bombing as well. So I think actually, the gendered aspect of it makes it more of a kind of sympathetic case. And I think that's one of the issues in terms of how we look back at incidents in the Troubles because there's so many of them, there often has to be this idea of like a kind of unimpeachable innocence and like this very sympathetic gendered aspect that women and children has a lot more sympathy than, like, say, like a 30 year old man would, in terms of deaths, just because they're slightly more unusual, but then it seems slightly more innocent as well. And I think that's kind of problematic. Often when you see the, again, how the newspapers reported it, it was often emphasizing the respectability of the family. And emphasizing, you know, how terrible was there was, you know, children killed, and this and there was women as well. And I think that was, again, trying to show well, this might be a bar, but it was a good bar wasn't a bad bar. And, you know, I think that's also a narrative that has increasingly come out in discussions of the Troubles is this idea of trying to create this kind of good or bad and everybody has to fall on one side. And actually moving away from the complexity of those types of conflicts, often, people can be a victim and a perpetrator at the same time. And people, you know, shouldn't be kind of discounted from being a victim, because they were involved in something that happened 20 years before, or they were related to somebody who did something else, which I see continually being brought up particularly on social media, like just from having worked with ex-prisoners. And you know, having done a lot of work and coming from Northern Ireland, like it's just so much more complex and trying to break down vi ctims into different hierarchies.
[Westlin' Winds by Eoin O'Donnell]
[Irish folk music]
Dr. Laura McAtackney 11:13
So essentially, what happened is the site was the Public Self was pretty much demolished in the bombing. And then it was cleared over a matter of time, eventually was built after a lot of protests from a lot of communities. And it didn't appear until the early 1980s. So this site was kind of derelict for quite a long time, there was a lot of other things going on around it, essentially, it was an institutional landscape. And you know, which had a lot of like work houses, police stations, things like that in the area. So it had a very interesting history in terms of how you live and persist in an area like that anyway, but there's been more social housing built, and then this motorway was put in over the top of it. And what it did essentially was go right over the area of the pub, the kind of pillars that hold up the motorway, because it runs up is directly over the corner of great George Street and North Queen Street. So that became the area that the pub was repressed into. And because it's pillars, it creates a kind of facade that looks a little bit like a building. And from a distance, it actually really does look like a building. And if you've seen the pictures of the pub from the 1960s, and 70s, they've replicated it exactly how it would have looked including a picture of a bar man standing in the doorway, which often appears in the photos of that bar. But there was also a longer trajectory to this. So the memorialization processes started in 2001, which was on the 30th anniversary of the bombing. And at that stage, a memorial Cross was put up, which is still in position, but it's dying the side of the pillar, and it's eventually had to get printed around it, which was to protect it, because as you'll also see, if you look up what's happened to that site, there's been a number of attacks on the mural and on the cross as well. And but there's also an interesting and statue of Mary that appears quite high up, it's actually right beside the road, which is, you know, over a person's height. And I spoke to a person who's a activist who's involved in this case, and he's actually a grandson of one of the people who was killed. And he tells me that there's stories of this statue of me reappeared straight after the bombing occurred. And there was one point at the site, and no one really knows where it came from. There was rumors that it was from the puppet self. But you know, he claims it wasn't it was, you know, someone put it there. But it's sort of reappearing quite early. And actually, before the memorials appear the official memorials. So after the first one in 2001, and that was associated with the start of a campaign to get, you know, more kind of pressure on the government to investigate what happened by 2011, then the mural appeared, which was the 40th anniversary. So there's an interesting, you know, connection between the site between being able to materialize it again, but also timely commemoration. So tying into decades, and it's often tied into, you know, going back to the media again, and trying to, to get more support. And also in 2011, there was a police ombudsman report by that stage, which did find that they there was bias and how their police had investigated the bombing at the time. So it's a really interesting site in terms of how it's continually rearticulated, to press for more investigations and for justice, essentially. But it's quite a big presence. And that road because it takes over quite a lot of space. And it does, you know, it's been added to over a number of times, there's also plaques that are higher up it as well, you can't always see all these things from photographs. And I visited the site myself, and there's actually quite a lot more detail you see in person than you can see. What I think is interesting about it is the area it's in, it's not somebody that gets a lot of foot traffic, you have to want to go there because there's a lot of road networks that have been created run that way to effectively make large junctions for a lot of cars to leave the city center and to move across but it's not really that inviting to walk. It's quite a difficult area to navigate. So but it's really visible by car. So and I think that's on purpose that this is quite a significant mural. that looks very much like what that bot bar was before the bombing happened. And that it's kind of playing that trick them with people who move quickly past it. It's not necessarily something to be seen by person. But it's definitely to be remain in the consciousness of people who will drive past it, which is much more in number than who would walk past it. So one of my things I was interested in, it's just Hi, the memory of that place has persisted materially even though the site has changed quite a lot, particularly at somewhere that I knew from growing up around that area. And I noticed how to change and then I started doing research into it just to figure out exactly what the processes and timescales were. And it was actually pretty interesting to as an archaeologist to study that
[Westlin' Winds by Eoin O'Donnell]
[Irish folk music]
Dr. Laura McAtackney 16:07
For a while, I've spent a lot of time studying materialized segregation, and also memorialization in Belfast because what I found in the literature is often there's quite a lot written about things like segregation, but there's actually not a lot of it is engages with the place. It doesn't really engage with the materiality of segregation. So there's often discussions about peace walls, and, and there's often this idea that there's like one big peace wall in Belfast. And that's it. And as you know, and it's actually very hard to quantify because there's a lot of subtlety around the architecture, which is meant to divide people, but increasingly in ways that doesn't look obvious. So a lot of the older piece walls are very obviously, they're to separate. But over time, they've tried to make those more subtle, so they don't look so oppressive, and they don't look so negative, but they're essentially doing the same job. And, you know, a lot of the work from that, you know, particularly from geographers and urban planners has pointed out that often roads work as peace lines and there's a lot of, you know, people self regulating how they move around the city. If you know, if you come from the area, you know how to navigate it, essentially. One of the other things, I think is probably an issue is that a lot of these sites, you know, they're very specific to where they are. So they generally appear at interfaces between working class communities, and most academics do not live in those types of areas. So I don't think even a lot of them have even been to some of the areas they're writing about it. They see maps and they you know, know where things are, but I don't know how many of them actually know what those sites look like, and what they look like at different times of the year. So whether they're affected by marching seasons, or whether they're affected by any types of, you know, kind of communal activities around them, some of them seem to become flashpoints some years and not other years. And so what's going on with the community tensions, and there are people who do a lot of good work with communities, but then they often don't engage with the material aspects as well. So what I became interested in was, whenever you move into a peace process, what impact is there on so many remnants of conflict staying behind, and particularly when they're only in particular types of areas. So when the city center is opened up, and all the infrastructure associated with conflicts removed, then that's what most people see. If you live in a middle class area, you never had peace walls, and you know, you didn't have any kind of intrusions like that. But when you live in areas that are working class, and particularly where there's social housing, then often they were, you know, highly regulated, and that never really changed. And there's a, you know, and how much that structures the city because it's very hard to restructure a city whenever you've imposed a lot of restrictions on movement and a lot of walls and a lot of ways to have to navigate them, then it's very hard to take that down. I wanted to add that material aspect to it like what archaeologists see? And so often I walk around them and I take note of what's changed and what hasn't changed. And that can be official um changes where there's been attempts by some public body to gentrify them or to make them look nicer or to change things. And particularly murals, because you know, the more kind of offensive ones tend to be fixed at different points, but also to look at how other people interact with them. So how much graffiti they have on them, if they've been paint bombed, if they've started to disintegrate, if they're being maintained. And to try and get a sense then of how people relate to them who live in those areas, what kind of other things were around them. And so what I wanted to do was take a more archeological approach was actually engaged with the materiality of the sites, because I've never like whenever I read all the papers, I got no sense of where they were, who lived beside them, if anyone lives beside them, you know, how you navigate them, how they materialize how the materials change over time. And so I thought that was an interesting archaeological perspective is actually to engage with the materiality of the place and the site. And I've actually spent quite a lot of time just revisiting sites, I've spent a lot of my time just walking around parts of the city. The last time I went was in December, I just went for a walk around those areas. And I always walk around the areas that I usually study as well. And I noticed that like, just things that you wouldn't really notice if you didn't walk around them is that there was a lot more banners about other issues, like you know, you find a lot of kind of anti-COVID, kind of, you know, stickers and things on pillars, the case of a child who went missing in Belfast, Noah Donoghoe, you know, there's a lot of insinuation that there's some kind of involvement in that that is not being investigated properly. And this is all over the media as well. And there was a lot of banners about that around the place as well, and often strategically in similar places that you would find murals too. So I just find it interesting how contemporary politics is tying into historical politics, and just how much there's an interaction between the historical politics of justice and ongoing issues, which are affecting people today. And then things that are completely unrelated as well. So I'm always interested in like, how do you live in those kinds of environments as well, where there's just so much kind of memory culture, and there's so much of a memory scape which ties you into a past, and like lots of other plaques hang in the other people who died and other incidents that are often not remembered at all. And I just find it interesting in terms of talking about peace processes that how do people feel they live in a peace process when they're continually surrounded by evidence of conflict and particularly conflicts that haven't been resolved.
[Irish folk music]
Eleanor Neil 21:23
Hi, there, Eleanor here, I just wanted to give some context for the next part of Dr. McAtackney's discussion. She'll be speaking about official governmental interventions and reconciliation and reparation processes, and specifically about the role of archives. This came up because in 2019, the Retention of Records Bill effectively closed all records gathered by the Irish government's Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, also known as the Ryan Commission, and the Residential Institutions Redress Board and Review Committee for 75 years. This effectively limited all research, not just by academics, but also by survivors of the Magdalene Laundries themselves to access the records generated by this committee, or even their own testimonies or personal information. Then, in July of 2021, the British government proposed what is essentially a ban on any prosecutions of Troubles-era crimes. The bill came into effect this year and while the wording is complex, and may still permit investigation into who perpetrated the bombing, it appears that mismanagement of investigation into bombings such as occurred around the McGurk's bombing will be halted. With that back to Dr. McAtackney.
[Irish folk music]
Dr. Laura McAtackney 22:43
Everything we do is political, everything that's funded is political everywhere we study things, we have to make political choices. And that could be you know, big P little P political. There's also a political nature in people claiming that things are not political. So there's something very political about claiming something's apolitical or only studying things you think are not political. And I think that is the case often in Ireland that, you know, archaeology is not kind of conceived as an overly political discipline. And that has a lot of reasons behind it. Like some of it is, you know, how detached it is from anthropology, unlike, you know, in other kinds of states like the US and elsewhere. I think it's interesting how much governments you know, are always very keen to reveal certain amounts of truth about the past but they never really want to reveal everything so, you know, we've noticed a real lack of desire to open files you know, to make people who were actively involved open their files as well. So there's, you know, there's this kind of Oh, yes, yes, we want to get to the truth, but actually that I don't think they really do. I think there's more a sense of okay, well, we know that everyone knows that certain things happen. So we'll say, right, fair enough, that happened. But we're not going to go further than that. Which again, I think, is why there's a different type of role for archaeology to play that we don't rely just on documents being our way into understanding the past. Like, we can see a lot of time the past persists into the present and how it doesn't. And it's one of the things we're really interested in, in contemporary archaeology is, you know, how do we play between absence and presence? And I talk about this a lot in my work with Magdalene Laundries. You know, there's a lot of stuff that hasn't survived for very particular reasons. And there's a lot of stuff that does survive, and it can muddy what we know of the past. And we over focus just on survivals, we have to think about what is also not here, you know, what can we not get at. And, you know, that's also why survivors' testimonies are so important, because they can often tell us things that we can't just see from objects, but including material culture can give us a different insight the documents don't, and people don't, and bringing them all together, I think you get the most full view of, you know, different perspectives on the past. And this is, again, like one of the issues I've talked about, with some colleagues about the limitations of history as well, that there's often this focus on, there'll be a document somewhere that's gonna say all this, you know, one thing with studying things that I do, which is the really recent past is that, you know, we have so many other means of trying to access experience, like what's documented in an archive is a very particular view in the past. And in some ways, it's our own view on certain types of past that's fine. But we shouldn't ever consider that as the only means of understanding particularly recent past. I've had colleagues who are historians in Northern Ireland thinking, Oh, great if we have this, like the British government wants to create an official history of the Troubles, which I can just imagine how terrible that would be. Either, they said, they've kind of went, Oh, that'd be great if they open all the files, and I'm like, well, great, okay, they open all the files. What is that going to tell you? Like one, they'll not open all the files, they'll open a certain number two, people do not put things in files, like oh, by the way, I know who killed this person. I know who did that, like people censor themselves, because they know that someone might see those files, like, there's a tiny percentage of files created by governments are kept for a variety of reasons I did this job as an archivist, I actually went and selected files. I know how much certain departments did not want us ever to look at stuff and never let us look at things. You just never one, it's never going to be in there to you're never going to get access to it all. Three, you have to understand there's not It's not retrievable, like, there's no way of understanding such a complicated conflict through files in a government archive. So that's, I think, really, when I became quite disenchanted with history, when I kind of realized that because I did a degree in archaeology and a degree in history, like I really like working with archives. But I absolutely do not think that they're the only means of accessing the past. And I loved archaeology, because I thought materials also have their own prejudices and their own difficulties. But they're not as openly manipulated, like people don't focus on them going, Oh, this is the only way into the story. They often tell us things that we don't, you know, forsee, or that we don't see in other contexts. And I just really like the kind of ability of that to allow us to sometimes find things that we don't even know we're looking for, like they had an exhibition on the Troubles in the Ulster Museum for years, a lot of text panels that were shaped like the backs of houses that had no objects whatsoever in it. And it's almost like the fear of the object that the fear of the material makes something concrete and real. So it's better just to have lots of text panels and a couple of photographs. And that really made me think a little bit more about archaeology and how important it is that actually we do materialize things. And they're hard to deny, like, you know, texts and voice can be opinions, but materials have this kind of reality about them that sometimes can scare you know, people trying to tell very cross-community stories that maybe just don't relate to these objects. But people just wanted to know like they want to know as a narrative they wanted to see objects they recognize they wanted to story in there. And so there's just sometimes much more of a fear than about what people will react to that actually isn't a reality people want to know more they want to see different stories in there.
[Westlin' Winds by Eoin O'Donnell]
[Irish folk music]
Dr. Laura McAtackney 28:23
You know, it's not incidental that these memorials are the Dave here. One, like a lot of these things cannot be asked for until the conflict was considered over. So it's only after 1998, a lot of these memorials started being created. So people also could officially start to remember. And I think there's also an issue in terms of heritage institutions in Northern Ireland, that they don't really meaningfully connect to those everyday experiences, it seems too controversial and too difficult to arbitrate. So they kind of ignore a lot of that. So, you know, people who live in those areas that are most impacted by the conflict tend to create their own memorial culture, which is directed by certain types of people. And, you know, it is problematic in some ways, as well. But it's also understandable, but I think that's a really important issue in terms of connecting the players, but connecting the people, you know, the you need to have people who will push for those types of justices to be addressed. They're not going to be addressed without somebody pushing for them. And essentially, nearly always, those groups are made up of people who are descendants or some way connected to people who died or who were injured in those big atrocities. Survivors of bombings like these are 50 years old, is that the longer you leave it, the less there is any memory of what happened. And the last is any chance of an injustice being done. And also because then we can just forget about it, because there's nobody it really affects and that has a really big impact in terms of how we're allowed to assess what happened in the conflict. If we don't have records of so many different things that happened. If they're just allowed to be forgotten, then we just don't really have a full story. And also, I think there's a huge issue in terms of the closures of records and so there's just a lot of records that have never been opened. There's a lot of records that have had extended closures, particularly recently, anything to do with victims of plastic bullets have been closed for an extra 50 6070 years. And the obvious aim is just that there's nobody going to be alive, who has any real connection to the person who was killed, and then probably won't really push, it'll just be an historical artifact to have a discussion about rather than it being an emotional connection to somebody real. From my perspective, there's a number of things that have happened in the last few years that make, you know, any kind of resolution of traumatic memory very difficult. And I think, obviously, the major one is Brexit, because it's really reignited issues of national identity, which were kind of, or at least kind of suppressed around the Good Friday Agreement, because that kind of ability to be British and Irish and the border not really existing anymore, I think, actually, you know, resolved that kind of issue for a lot of at least moderate nationalist didn't really become overly fixated in a united Ireland. But I think once there was an attempt to divide Northern Ireland from the rest of Ireland, that became a much harder issue, and it became much more contentious. And it's obviously became more and more contentious, because, you know, the government we have in London is really just concerned with protecting themselves. So they're, you know, they don't really care enough about Northern Ireland and want to keep it they don't want to spend a lot of money on infrastructure on the border, which would be really almost impossible to implement. And I just think it's created a much more difficult political environment. And, you know, any kind of societal stresses like we've been on during the last couple of years, you know, with a pandemic are always going to make society more tense anyway. And I think all these things added together have just made a ferry, a much less compromising kind of society and one that is not really coming together in ways that you know, you would hope for in a post conflict context.
Eleanor Neil 31:52
Thank you, Dr. McAtackney. I'm Eleanor Neil and this is has been “Archaeological Identities.”
[Irish folk music]
Anar Parikh 32:09
Thanks for listening to another episode of Anthropological Airwaves. Special thanks to Dr. Laura McAtackney for her generous insights on archaeology and memory in Northern Ireland. The episode was written, edited, and produced by Eleanor Neil with additional production support from Anar Parikh—the Executive Producer of Anthropological Airwaves and Associate Editor of the Podcast at American Anthropologist. The episode also features the track Westlin’ Wilds by Eoin O’Donnell, and the intro and outro music your is titled “Waiting” by Crowander. Don’t forget to check the show notes, as well as the episode transcript for further reading.
Anar Parikh 32:49
As always, a closed caption version of all of Anthropological Airwaves episodes, including this one, will be available on our YouTube channel and a full transcription on the episode page on the American Anthropologist website. Links to both are included in the show notes. If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to subscribe to Anthropological Airwaves wherever you listen to podcasts. Also, don’t forget to rate and review us while you’re there. A five-star review in particular can help other listeners find the show! We would also love to hear from you in general. If you have feedback, recommendations, or thoughts on recent episodes, send an email to amanthpodcast@gmail.com. You can also reach out to us on our Facebook page or on Twitter with the handle @AnthroAirwaves. Find links to all of our contact information in the show notes and on the Anthropological Airwaves section of the American Anthropologist website. Take it easy! We’ll be back next month with the third and final installment of “Archaeological Identities.”
[outro music]