Format: Paper presentations followed by panel discussion. Panels will consist of the presenters in each session and a moderator. We will endeavour to ensure wide geographic coverage, with presentations from a diversity of countries.
Convenors:
Prof. Tracy Ireland
University of Canberra, Australia
Tracy.Ireland@canberra.edu.au
Dr Steve Brown
University of Canberra, Australia
Steve.Brown@canberra.edu.au
Prof. John Schofield
University of York, UK
john.schofield@york.ac.uk
What new perspectives can archaeology contribute to understandings of past, present, and future engagements with nuclear technologies? How can narratives created through archaeological methods and approaches contribute to stories of global nuclear heritage and history, to public dialogue concerning nuclear energy policy, and to truth telling surrounding difficult and often toxic legacies?
For this session, we welcome presentations from anywhere in the world that speak to the archaeology and heritage of nuclear technologies in all their forms, including radium and uranium mining and processing, scientific experimentation, military testing and use, reactor construction and decommissioning, uses of medical isotopes, and waste management and disposal. The presentations can range from case studies of specific places to broad-scale analyses of industrial landscapes and flows of nuclear-related activities. We are also interested in the impacts of nuclear technologies and practices on Indigenous and local communities and their associated difficult colonial, dispossession, and material culture legacies. We anticipate that such explorations will foreground archaeological methods and approaches and the ways that they build new knowledge, perspectives, and narratives.
This proposal is associated with the Australian Research Council Linkage Project ‘Nuclear Nation: A contemporary archaeology of Australia’s atomic heritage’. The partner organisations are the Museum of Arts and Applied Sciences, Sydney, and the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), Australia’s national nuclear organisation. This interdisciplinary project brings together academics, curators, scientists, and First Nations researchers, using innovative contemporary archaeology approaches, to generate new understandings of the significance of Australia’s atomic heritage in global context. Expected outcomes include improved capacity for heritage management, and new resources and methods for understanding and interpreting Australia’s role in the Anthropocene. The project aims to generate substantial benefits for policy-setting, and for tourism and cultural sectors more broadly.
Papers:
Processes of Heritage Transformation at sites of Nuclear Colonialism
Suzie Thomas, Dept of Heritage, University of Antwerp, Belgium
Hélène Verreyke, Dept of Heritage, University of Antwerp, Belgium
In the Cold War, ‘remote’ locations were selected for nuclear weapons testing. Colonised and politically dependent territory was effectively sacrificed to nuclear colonialism. Limited research has been done on the heritage impacts and legacies of nuclear colonialism, differing from ‘nuclear cultural heritage’ research, which has focussed on nuclear waste or investigated nuclear disasters.
This paper explores three viewpoints. Firstly, heritage as experienced in the private sphere. The communities most affected by nuclear tests are Indigenous, and experiences of nuclear colonialism have forever affected heritage understandings and practices within these communities. At the same time, the impacts of nuclear weapons tests have been devastating, and many victims have since felt over-burdened by curious researchers.
The second is the formation of heritage that gains ‘official’ recognition, including mandates to preserve and efforts to commodify places and their stories for touristic consumption. For Bikini Atoll (like Genbaku Dome), connections are made in the World Heritage List inscription with peace; at odds with the violence of these sites. Such ‘peace-washing’ is potentially problematic.
A third viewpoint is the future. Nuclear colonialism contributes to long-term, partially understood and anxiety-driven futures in which places rendered harmful have at the same time significant heritage values.
Toxic Legacies and Archaeological Signatures: Tracing the ‘Bikini Incident’
Steve Brown, Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, University of Canberra, Australia
This paper draws on a case study of the Daigo Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon # 5), a Japanese fishing vessel notorious for having been showered on 1 March 1954 with pulverised and radioactive coral and sand derived from the largest explosion nuclear test by the USA. Code-named Castle Bravo, the 15 Megaton thermonuclear (hydrogen bomb) explosion, one of the most destructive human-caused environmental disasters in history, became globally publicised almost entirely because of the experience of Daigo Fukuryu Maru, its crew, and its cargo of toxic fish. Atmospheric and ocean currents spread fallout from the Castle Bravo detonation over the following months, with traces of toxic radioactive material found in Japan, India, and Australia, as well as in parts of Europe and the USA. The presentation will consider the legacies of radioactive substances and their archaeological signatures in land and ocean environments and human bodies, including those of archaeologists. Drawing on Timothy Morton’s concept of ‘hyperobject’, I suggest that nuclear radiation that has become co-constituted with the environment and humans is an invisible form of toxic heritage ever-present in the work of archaeology—and thus concealed in the political, social, and more-than human contexts in which we work.
Re-Valuing Jabiluka: The Cultural Heritage Places and Values of a Uranium Mineral Lease, Mirarr Country, Northern Australia
Lynley A. Wallis, Griffith University and Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation
Yvonne Margarula, May Nango, Djaykuk Djandjomerr, Clarrie Nadjamerrek, Anne Murrimal and Martin Liddy, Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation
The Jabiluka Mineral Lease (JML) lies in the Northern Territory, Australia, in the Mirarr clan estate, entirely surrounded by World Heritage-listed Kakadu National Park (KNP). The lease contains numerous sacred sites, including the Boyweg-Almudj Sacred Site complex, alongside hundreds of heritage sites, such as rockshelters with ancient rock art. Among them is the 65,000 year old Madjedbebe rockshelter, Australia’s oldest known archaeological site. With Prime Minister Albanese announcing in late 2024 that Jabiluka will not be mined and will be incorporated into KNP, a review of JML’s heritage management history is both timely and necessary.
Despite its incredible cultural, archaeological and scientific significance, ever since the discovery of uranium there in the late 1960s, Jabiluka has been primarily valued as an economic resource. The Commonwealth government approved mining there in 1982, despite strong opposition from the Mirarr. In 1998, construction of the Jabiluka tunnel commenced, sparking a major Mirarr-led blockade. Work was eventually halted, and by 2003 the tunnel was backfilled. In this paper we explore the Jabiluka controversy in light of changing politics, increasing recognition of Indigenous rights and the re-ignited debate around nuclear power in Australia.
Cold War Technology in the Tropics: Contemporary Archaeology of the LORAN (Long Range Navigation) System Communications Infrastructure as an Artefact of the Mid 20th century American Military Industrial Complex
Alistair Paterson, University of Western Australia
A cybernetic approach interested in unifying archaeology, military heritage and infrastructure heritage is deployed in this presentation in order to provide new comparative understandings of the place of communications infrastructure in mid twentieth century Australia and Southeast Asia during WW2 and the Cold War. The LORAN (Long Range Navigation) system invented in the USA towards the end of the Second World War was an important development in safe navigation and sensing, remaining significant during the early years of the Cold War. Archaeological research at a LORAN base on Niawalarra island, northern Kimberley, reveals new information about the society, technology and ideology of the Americans, comparatively distinct from nearby Australian radar facilities.
From a Finnish Nuclear Plant Fiasco to Recycling and the End of the Post-Cold War
Timo Ylimaunu, University of Oulu, Finland
Laura McAtackney, University College Cork, Ireland
Finnish energy policy was balanced between the east and west during the Cold War period and the country’s nuclear policy followed this pattern. The Fennovoima nuclear energy company started to build a new power plant in 2014 in partnership with the Russian State Energy Corporation known as Rosatom. As a legacy of the Cold War, Finnish politicians rejected all concerns about the Rosatom’s close connections to Putin’s regime during the 2010s. The construction works for the power plant at Pyhäjoki commenced in the same year that Russia started its war in Eastern Ukraine (2014).
In our paper we will discuss how the Pyhäjoki site was deserted after Russia started its full-scale war in Ukraine in 2022 and how the planned nuclear plant industrial halls ended up as recycling material. The Pyhäjoki site has a temporal connection to the demolished Russian gas pipelines and to the continuing damage of the data cables at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. The Finnish former nuclear site, and the destroyed energy and network cable infrastructure, are the material implications of the ruined legacy of the Finnish Cold War and post-Cold War relationship with Russia, and another outcome of the Russian War in Ukraine.
From Traces of Opposition to Heritages of Hope: A Contemporary Archaeology of Anti-nuclear and Anti-uranium Mining Activism in Finland
Marko Mikael Marila, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice; University of Turku, Finland
In comparison to the landscape scars left behind by uranium mining or the construction of deep geological repositories for high level nuclear waste, the material traces of anti-nuclear activism are inconspicuous, tucked away in obscure museums or hiding in the landscape, revealing themselves only to the most attentive. In this paper, I turn my attention to the rocky traces of Finnish anti-nuclear and anti-uranium mining activism dating to the late 1900s and early 2000s. Through two case studies on environmental art carved into the Finnish bedrock, I reflect on the evidentiary value of anti-nuclear and anti-uranium mining rock art for a contemporary archaeology of nuclear politics and argue that, rather than food for retroductive inferences to past events, these artworks continue to exist as witnesses to future imaginaries.
South Africa’s Nuclear Heritage: A First Exploration
Jo-Ansie van Wyk, Dept of Political Sciences, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) verified South Africa’s nuclear weapons disarmament in 1993. Prior to that, and despite comprehensive international sanctions against South Africa, the apartheid regime developed and produced six nuclear weapons during a period of extreme nuclear techno-nationalism and global isolation. This aspect of apartheid has left an indelible legacy that endures well into the post-apartheid era. Despite this, the heroic narrative of South Africa’s nuclear past, namely its unique status as a state that has voluntarily dismantled is nuclear weapons and programme, remains dominant in the context of the country’s heritage and specifically, its nuclear heritage. Besides this non-material artefact, other materialities of South Africa’s nuclear heritage remain ignored, neglected, and/or remain hidden in inaccessible archives. Therefore, given the country’s nuclear past and its consideration of the future expansion of its nuclear energy generation capacity, the paper analyses South Africa’s nuclear heritage. Proposing the notion of Critical Nuclear Humanities, the research draws on archival and other primary sources, as well as authoritative secondary sources.
Contending Priorities and the Construction of Nuclear Narratives: A Case Study of Heritage-making in the United States’ Secret Cities
Ella Goulding, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA
Nuclear work forms a cornerstone of local identity in the U.S.’s ‘secret cities’: Oak Ridge, TN, Richland, WA, and Los Alamos, NM. Built to support the development of atomic weapons during WWII, these cities today continue to facilitate national research in nuclear-related fields. As such, they represent unique landscapes in which nuclear legacies are presented to and by the public. These landscapes include monuments honouring nuclear workers and the victims of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, murals featuring symbols of scientific research, and Manhattan Project-themed breweries.
These examples embody various nuclear-themed narratives found within the cities’ material landscapes, ranging from the critical to the overtly celebratory. This paper will explore the trajectories of these narratives and their relationship to two key locations: official heritage sites, which often reflect more critically on the legacies of nuclear work, and local businesses, which employ celebratory narratives in their promotional materials. Drawing from GIS maps and visual data collected as part of ongoing research into the secret cities, this paper will argue that heritage-making in these locations should not be understood as emerging from a singular, universally accepted narrative about nuclear work but rather as being shaped by various contending local priorities.
Nuclear Nation: A Contemporary Archaeology of Australia’s Atomic Heritage
Tracy Ireland, University of Canberra, Australia
Ashley van den Heuvel, University of Canberra, Australia
John Schofield, University of York, UK
While historical analyses of Australia’s nuclear era are growing, the materiality of these activities, and their landscape signatures, have not yet received similar attention. Our ARC Linkage project, Nuclear Nation, a partnership with the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences in Sydney and the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), sets out to explore Australia’s national engagement with nuclear science through its material culture and physical infrastructure—from early 20th century radium mining through to contemporary military, industrial, medical, and scientific applications. Working alongside First Nations researchers, a multi-scalar approach aims interweave the local and global, moving from specific narratives of objects and collections, to the international geopolitical networks that they are entangled in.
The project uses archaeological approaches to map and analyse the material legacies of these processes, informed by the methods and insights of contemporary archaeology, as well as Gorman’s ‘archaeology of the future’—in that the implications of these entanglements are unfinished and ongoing. This abandoned infrastructure of late capitalism reveals modernity as an unfinished project, experienced differently by diverse groups. Nuclear Nation aims to move beyond the ‘representational’ approach of traditional heritage analyses to understand the affective intensity of atomic heritage, for a better comprehension of its significance in contemporary culture.
The Power of the Advert: Trade, Imagery and Optimism in the Construction of Early UK Nuclear Power Stations
Wenna Potter, University of York, funded by Nuclear Decommissioning Authority
The commercialisation of nuclear power in the 1950s and 1960s saw the development of a new large-scale industry. As such, no single company was equipped to design and construct a nuclear power station in isolation so the UK government encouraged the formation of consortia to draw expertise from associated relevant industries and bid for tenders. The consortium model meant each early commercial station was of unique design. Many companies were responsible for providing parts to the nuclear industry, and these were often advertised through sections in industrial journals.
This presentation will analyse industrial advertising to examine methods and imagery used for promotion. Key themes include Atoms for Peace and international knowledge sharing, the early representation of nuclear as a ‘clean energy’, and emphasis placed on modernity and optimism. Industrial adverts also offer a valuable method to trace the supply chain included in the construction of nuclear power stations, to see the breadth and variety of involvement in the development of a new industry from a national and international perspective. Industrial adverts demonstrate how existing industries were utilised to meet the demands of nuclear technology and highlight their role in developing alternative parts specific to the industry.