Collecting and Curating COVID-19 Heritage: Challenges of Conservation and Management

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic raises questions about curation, collecting, and the ethics of documenting a traumatic event as it occurs in real time. Such concerns became clear as the co-authors embarked on a multi-sited study of the pandemic’s impact on four communities in two different countries. Defining an ‘artefact’ or what is archaeological, for instance, became a complicated exercise; do chalk artworks on the sidewalk, painted rocks lining a neighbourhood trail, posters stapled on community billboards, and stuffed animals in someone’s window count as archaeological artefacts? Determining the temporal boundaries of the pandemic is also difficult; while it is fairly clear when the pandemic first began, it continues to have an impact on our post-lockdown world. Its global impact also means that the material changes and landscape alterations the co-authors witnessed were not confined or isolated to one place and one time, but rather exist in multitudes across the globe.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• heritage
• ethics
• contemporary archaeology
• materiality
• collections management

Acknowledgements

Dante Angelo wants to acknowledge the University of Tarapacá and the Fondo de fortalecimiento Grupos de Investigación UTA 3765-23 for supporting the time to work on this publication.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We are all university employees (faculty and research/administrative staff) who did not have ‘essential workers’ in our homes and who were able to work from home without risk of losing our jobs. Each of us also had school-age children at home throughout the period of data collection. These factors – location, job security, the relative physical safety provided by our occupations, and our experiences as parents – all affected our ability to engage in this research and the types of information that flowed into our households.

2. Crowdsourcing involves soliciting the public to donate and/or contribute heritage that reflects or best represents the event an institution wishes to document (see Brigham et al. 2022). Crowdsourcing can be done in a variety of ways, including asking specific questions of people via email, phone, public events, and/or video call; specifying types of materials an institution wishes to collect, such as a mask; identifying a particular group of people from whom heritage can be collected, such as asylum seekers; and/or open-ended collecting whereby an institution asks the general public to submit a broad array of heritage items related to an event (Zumthurm 2021). ‘Citizen science’, as Brigham et al. (2022) discuss, is another popular method to collect data. They argue this method provides a ‘more focused scientific outcome and engages non-subject experts in some point of the scientific process’, which as they illustrate can be helpful for heritage management of already known archaeological sites. This may be a more complicated method when the “what to collect’’ question is not clearly defined.

3. In Brazil, protests erupted against the violence that, among other things, killed Marielle Franco, a Rio de Janeiro politician, during the early days of the administration of Bolsonaro and lasted for most of 2019 and 2020. Similarly, in October of that year, Bolivia’s and Chile’s governments confronted popular uprisings that set these countries in a realm of instability that permeated the whole continent. During the COVID-19 pandemic, these countries established a tight system of control of their population, in some cases imposing military control that effectively suppressed the rhythm of the protest and social discontent.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Tarapacá Fondo de fortalecimiento Grupos de Investigación UTA 3765-23.

Notes on contributors

Dante Angelo

Dante Angelo is an Assistant Professor of the Anthropology Department of the Universidad de Tarapacá, Chile. His research interests include: modernity, politics (in and out the discipline), nationalisms and post-nationalisms and materiality.

Kelly M. Britt

Kelly M. Britt is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brooklyn College and a member of the Department of Anthropology Faculty at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center.

Margaret Lou Brown

Margaret Lou Brown is Senior Research Scholar with the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University where she directs public scholarship programming and conducts research in cultural anthropology.

Stacey L. Camp

Stacey L. Camp is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Campus Archaeology Program at Michigan State University.