UNESCO

Chair on Heritage Futures

Col-Futures

2024-05-03

Today and tomorrow, The UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures has been co-hosting Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay of the Co-Futures project at the University of Oslo. They are the hub of a number of interrelated and well-funded projects.

CoFUTURES is an international group working on Global Futures with its sphere of activities scattered across various communities, research groups and networks around the world. Among others, they work on speculative fiction, co-futures literacy, and contemporary futurism. An insipiring alternative to established approaches in foresight and Futures Studies that predominate in the corporate and policy world.

Archaeologies of the Near Future

2023-10-27

Jim Leary published in April 2023 three creative essays on “Archaeologies of the Near Future” in Epoiesen: A Journal for Creative Engagement in History and Archaeology. This relates to his TAG session in 2021 with the same title.

Leary’s aim was to imagine the role of archaeology in the year 2223 of the common era. His goal:

“to project yourselves, not into the past, as archaeologists are wont to do, but into the near future – a future still two centuries away. To think about a future world in which we are the past. A future none of us will ever know, but one not so distant, I think, to be completely unimaginable.”

Did he succeed in what he calls “extreme horizon scanning” and “archaeo-futurology”? Only partly. The essay Brushstrokes questions a number of archaeological practices as we know them today, and it certainly does revolve around a fascinating idea not known from the present. The Site diary of an Interplanetary Heritage Officer is set on Mars (a bit as in the movie The Martian). 

But much of the scenarios presented are less “unimaginable” and “extreme” than I was expecting and hoping for. Archaeology is still about discoveries about the past. Even on Mars there are interplanetary heritage officers maintaining the Martian Historic Environment Record, identifying interplanetary heritage sites (IHS), and designating Sites of Importance under the Outer Space Treaty. The narrator of the story did his PhD on the archaeology of starships and writes reports about a level 2 robotic survey recommending designation.

Time travel it may be, but not necessarily to the future.