Using an objects-based approach with a focus on arctic archaeology of WWII, this book attempts to unleash archaeology's potential by opting for a past that resists historical time and reveals the importance of a symmetrical archaeology approach to the past.

In this book, two leading theoretical archaeologists and the founding figures of what has been called “symmetrical archaeology” turn their attention to what kinds of pasts that archaeology make possible. The book is an attempt unleash archaeology's potential by opting for a past that resists historical time and the tropes of succession and replacement that the discipline has committed itself to for nearly two centuries. Olsen and Witmore take up this task by boldly targeting one of the periods most thoroughly studied by historians, WWII. Building on over a decade of archaeological fieldwork and excavation at Sværholt,an erstwhile Wehrmacht artillery battery of the Atlantic Wall at the outermost terrestrial edge of continental Europe, they demonstrate precisely what difference archaeology can make to a period saturated by history. Through in-depth archaeological engagements with the prisoner-of-war camp, fishing hamlet, battery, and garrison they offer pasts other than what archaeologists have always subsumed to take historical form. Among the innovations of this richly pictorial book is a novel design that begins with the encounter and works its way to pasts otherwise. Along the way the authors articulate new conceptions of presence, patience, waiting, and the post-history of things, while distilling new theoretical insights in text boxes that offer points of pause and excursus throughout the book. Through a detailed engagement with what remains above and below the surface, Olsen and Witmore touch on the central problems of archaeological engagement, inference, and interpretation.