Art & Archaeology Fieldwork was part of our Material City programme. All our Mateiral City events are recorded and transcribed for Situations Papers.

Contextual contemporary art and archaeology are both areas in which field practice is central to research. From 30 March to 1 April 2007, three artists and three archaeologists conducted an interdisciplinary fieldwork project at Broadmead, a site undergoing redevelopment in Bristol.

The past five years have witnessed the emergence of new archaeological engagements with the very recent past. Where the passage of 30 or 50 years was traditionally seen as necessary for materials to become appropriate for archaeological examination, archaeologists increasingly engage the remains of the recent/remembered past. Such ‘contemporary archaeologies’ range from Cold War protest sites in Nevada and Greenham Common to the landscapes of dot.com boom and bust in Silicon Valley, or objects in an abandoned Cambridgeshire council flat.

One consequence of such 'contemporary archaeology' is a shift from defining archaeology by its object (ancient things) to defining archaeology as a bundle of site-specific practices performed in the present. Issues of methodology are particularly pressing in the context of urban regeneration, where in the development of ‘brownfield’ sites, the value of late 20th century built heritage is unclear or contested. The sheer quantities of materials which survive from the recent past and the possibilities of working with people as well as material things in documenting the ‘remembered past’ bring new challenges and possibilities in practice.

The role of artists and cultural projects in urban regeneration in the UK has been well documented and debated since the early 1990s with a shift from a focus on capital projects to the role of the arts in community-led renewal. Archaeologists have been formally involved in mitigating the impact or urban developments since the 1970s, but rarely engage with the transformation of late 20th century landscapes. By foregrounding the ‘collision’ of artists and archaeologists in a fieldwork project, this project moves away from producing new artworks or archaeological preservation by record: instead it explores the potential for working with the shifting materialities – both destruction and residuality – of urban renewal.

The site of the fieldwork project was Broadmead, a major urban redevelopment project (2005-2009), led by the Bristol Alliance in the centre of Bristol. The development replaces the central Broadmead shopping district, built during the 1950s and 1960s on extensively bomb-damaged land, and largely pedestrianised during the 1970s.

On Saturday 28 April 2007, the participating artists and archaeologists presented their experiences of fieldwork at a symposium hosted at Arnolfini, Bristol. Please visit Situations papers for more information on the symposium.

Read James Dixon's response to the fieldwork project here