The Land Gone Wild. Archaeological and Transdisciplinary Research on Resilience Strategies in the 20th Century

Consortium:
Institute of Archaeology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague
University of West Bohemia in Pilsen (Faculty of Philosophy and Faculty of Mechanical Engineering)
The Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences (IE CAS)
Charles University, Center for Theoretical Studies

Project duration: 1 January 2025 – 31 December 2028
Scientific Project Manager: Doc. PhDr. Pavel Vařeka, Honorary Professor
International Scientific Board of the project:
Prof. Eagle Glassheim; Prof. Thora Pétursdottir, PhD.; PhD., Dr. Alfredo Gonzáles-Riuabal; Univ. Prof. Dr. Ira Spieker; Prof. Dr. Claudia Theune

Mission of the project

“The Land Gone Wild is not only the name of this project, but also the name of Jiří Stránský’s novel and the television series based on it. The title contains everything we need to understand the project purpose and its meaning. First of all, land, not in the sense of nationality or territory, but the land in the physical sense, in the idea of space in which the past is preserved and archived in the various layers and sediments. A land that will need to be explored and “dug up” in order to find out about its wildness more than we can find in archival documents. And why wild? Because this is primarily a period of great crisis in the 1940s and 1950s, period of several waves of wildness, whether state or institutional, or peoples vengeful. All of these wildernesses left their mark not only in official records, but also in the landscape, in the land, and in us.”

Today’s Czech society faces several interconnected threats (external threat from hostile power, internal threat from political extremists, risk of intentional influence operations, risk of uncoordinated spread of disinformations), which are largely connected by the purposeful handling of the interpretation of the recent past and the manipulation of community memory. It is possible to counter this risk and increase social resilience by using new categories of sources (modern artifacts, ecofacts and their structures, study of the sub-recent landscape and material manifestations of the memory of communities that inhabited it or still live there). These sources provide equally authentic testimony about the past as commonly used official documents, ego-documents, literary images or memories of eyewitnesses, but due to their material (and not narrative) nature, they show significantly higher resistance to misinterpretation than usual historical narratives.

When Jiří Stránský (1931-2019), writer, translator, a significant representative of the Czech Boy Scout movement and multiple political prisoner of the communist regime, released his novel Zdivočelá země (The Land Gone Wild) in 1991 (the manuscript from 1970 could not be published earlier), which was soon filmed as TV-Series, the attention of the Czech society has turned from the “great history” to stories at a local and personal level. How the individuals, families, groups of friends, ordinary inhabitants of villages and towns faced the critical periods of history linked to both Nazi and communist totalitarianism? What were the survival strategies and their societal, moral but also material impact? How and why have the whole society as well as all aspects of everyday life and the face of the country changed during the 1940s-1980s? These issues are pivotal for the research project, bearing in honor of J. Stránský and his generation the same title, which aims to study the resilience strategies of the modern Central-Eastern European society in the 20th century based primarily on material evidence. Contemporary archaeology emerged in the Czech Republic during the last fifteen years and currently belongs to most dynamic specializations of the field at the national level. All relevant academic teams and scholars are joining now in one project consortium to establish interdisciplinary research direction focused on tangible remains regarding selected components of recent contested past the acknowledgement and interpretation of which still divide contemporary society. The project team is composed of staff from the Czech Academy of Sciences and leading universities and comprises of archaeologists including remote sensing specialists, cultural anthropologists, historians, digital humanities´, environmental and historical technology experts.

Research topics

Work Package 1 – Changes of the Modern Landscape and Rural Settlement

The Czech countryside has changed dramatically over the course of the 20th century. The cultural landscape and settlements have been affected not only by the rapid social and economic development of the modern era, but also by political decisions that have interrupted centuries of continuous development. The first research plan aims at three thematic areas, the study of which, using archaeological methods and in cooperation with other disciplines, opens up new possibilities for understanding the recent past of our countryside and can also contribute to solving the problems of this often neglected segment of our country: A) the disappearance of village settlements after 1945 as a result of the displacement of German residents, B) the reflection of this change in the form of current cemeteries in the border region and C) the material record of collectivization. Through the research excursion to Central Asia, we will obtain contrasting data sets for the purpose of studying the materiality of collectivization, which was enforced in various parts of the world dominated by the totalitarian ideology of Marxism-Leninism. The interdisciplinary research is connected to Work package 5 and 6.

Work Package 2: Industrial Archaeology

The industrial heritage of the 20th century represents an inexhaustible spectrum of remnants of the activities of modern society, which is practically impossible to grasp in its entirety. The project will therefore focus only on its small but extremely significant sector, which is represented by the exploitation of tin and uranium ore in the Ore Mountains. Both metals formed a strategic raw material of great importance, especially for the war production of the Nazi and communist regimes. The Ore Mountains ore mining and processing industry thus acquired global importance in the 1930s to 1960s. Huge state investments flowed into the Ore Mountains projects, regardless of economic profitability. At the same time (in addition to significant material investments) tens of thousands of workers were deployed here, who were to participate in the mining and processing of non-ferrous metal ores, later especially uranium. A significant part of them were real and perceived enemies of totalitarian regimes and prisoners of war, first these were the members of the armies fighting Nazi Germany and after the war, the German soldiers were stationed there. Historical research has been devoted to the prison camps for a long time, living conditions in the camps and the fate of prisoners, but attention has not yet been paid to the economic and technical nature of the activities that forced laborers had to perform. This opens space for complex transdisciplinary research, which will be connected in content with the topics of Work Package 1 (transformation of the landscape), WP 3 (modern conflict), WP 4 (dark legacy of the 20th century) and WP 5 (archaeology of memory). The research will offer a case study using a wide range of historical and other sources, such as preserved material remains of industrial sites, planning and drawing documentation, period photographs and aerial photographs, or industry machinery preserved to this day in situ at reference sites abroad.

Work Package 3: Archaeology of Modern Conflict

There is no escape from modern war, as it affects vast territories and blurs the distinctions between the battlefield and the rear areas. The archaeology of modern conflicts has shown that, by its emphasis on uncovering material records, it can fundamentally expand traditional historical sources, but also open up new perspectives on the events of both World Wars, the Cold War, and the other conflicts of the 20th century. In this research project, we choose three research topics. A) First topic includes the Aerial warfare, which transferred combat activity into the third dimension and extended the horrors of war to the civilian areas of the countries involved. As part of the project, we will focus on the aviation archaeology of the Second World War, for the study of which Czech countries provide well-preserved material remains. Comparative research will be carried out in a very contrasting, northernmost war zone of this conflict, in Finnish Lapland (as a part of the cooperation with the University of Turku). B) The second topic focuses on the events at the very end of the World War II in Czech lands, which were related to the last combat actions, the retreat of German armed forces, the resistance activities and repressions against the Czech population, the uprising, liberation and the subsequent establishment of prison camps for the German soldiers and the internment facilities for civilians. Separate attention will be dedicated to the liberation of Western Bohemia and especially Pilsen by the American Army, which has left a deep mark on local historical memory, and has been commemorated annually by several military history reenacting groups. C) The last topic includes the archaeology of the Cold War, the research of which is only in its early beginnings (unlike in Western Europe and the USA) in the countries of the former Warsaw Pact. The research focuses on the remains of the abandoned military bases, including the Soviet army garrisons, relics of the anti-aircraft defense and the Iron Curtain.

Work Package 4: Archaeology of State Terror, Internment and Forced Labour

In the 20th century, Central European societies went through deep crises, which are archaeologically clearly manifested by the horizon of the specific landscape monuments, which are the relics of internment facilities. This is a material manifestation of totalitarian social engineering. The nature of these interventions was diverse, from the extermination of individuals and entire social groups, through their social isolation and economic exploitation, to various levels of social rehabilitation and (re)education. These measures were usually presented as a necessity in the interest of increasing social resilience (isolation or outright liquidation of individual social groups for racial, national or social class reasons) and always led to the emergence of collective traumas that paradoxically weaken society in the long term (e.g. the relationship of Czech society to the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti or the expulsion of the German population). Based on artifacts and ecofacts from the environment of internment sites, archaeology could also identify the resilience strategies of long-term stressed individuals and groups who had to live in these specific settlement areas. These are aspects that official documents or memories of eyewitnesses usually do not cover (for example the peculiarities in the handling of the settlement waste, artistic and craft expressions of internees, alcoholism of guards), and even documents of the cohabitation of internees and jailers, which are completely outside the discourse of memorial narrative and scientific research. The aim of the WP is to connect and supplement the archaeological picture of internment facilities so that the depth and systematicity of their knowledge advances to the level that this phenomenon has reached in the field of historical and social sciences, for which it has been a key topic for many decades.

Work Package 5: Archaeology of Memory and Culture Heritage

The aim of WP 5 is to propose appropriate procedures for handling the heritage of the 20th century through a critical ethnological analysis of the emergence, transformation and memory legacy of the material heritage of the turning events of the 20th century and to contribute to strengthening the resilience of Czech society against the analogous challenges of the present and the near future. The WP has both high international relevance and fundamental application potential for several institutions. The main research topics will be dedicated to the transformation of the Czech landscape and society because of the displacement and resettlement of the Sudetenland, the collectivization of the countryside, the emergence and demise of totalitarian regimes and the transformation of the character of the state border. The basic research methods will be interviews, (participant) observations and archival research. The research and its processing will be carried out in close cooperation with other WPs. The main outputs will be articles in impact journals and other publications (non-impact articles, chapters in books), conference presentations, cooperation with foreign partners, and incoming and outgoing mobilities. At the same time, participation in project will lead to the increasing competence of the research team in the form of professional training.

Work Package 6: The Materiality of Memory in the 20th and 21st Centuries. A Dialogue of Theoretical Approaches in Archaeology, Anthropology and Philosophy, Regarding the Memory of the Landscape and Global Challenges of the Present

The research explores the relationship between material culture, memory and landscape in the context of the current global challenges facing humanity in the Anthropocene era. It aims to build and connect theory across disciplines for the sake of a deeper understanding of the dynamics of memory formation in the landscape. The research is connected to the ongoing work of the team members and synergistically and actively links all the archaeological investigations and interpretations with ethnographic studies of memory, becoming a key element in connecting both approaches. This enables a deeper understanding of the role of material heritage in the formation of social memory and identity in the context of the Anthropocene and its specific challenges for human existence.

Work Package 7: Interdisciplinary Support

The work package develops specific approaches to the application of geophysics, remote sensing data, digital humanities and historical research (including oral history) aimed at collaboration with archaeological and ethnological research on 20th century European societies.