Abstract

Several thousand archaeological sites in peatlands across Europe have been lost or damaged through drainage and peat extraction. Whilst rehabilitation/restoration programmes (e.g.Nordbeck and Hogl 2023) offer potential positive benefits for preservation of surviving sites in situ, many such schemes tend to inadvertently ‘forget’ about archaeology (Gearey and Everett, 2021). The climate crisis presents further threats to such tangible cultural heritage, but the sociocultural context of the exploitation of peat in various countries, especially Ireland, is tied to complex expressions of intangible cultural heritage (e.g. O’ Connor and Gearey 2022), leading to extended debates around the ‘green future’ of these environments. What might trans-disciplinarity offer in such tightly contested spaces, specifically the interface between archaeology, different forms of heritage, and modes of representation/communication via the literary and visual arts? Can we create nuanced, hopeful narratives around peatland rehabilitation and the past loss of tangible archaeological sites? In this seminar, I discuss five years of collaboration between academics, NGOs, artists and other communities of practice, outlining processes, and outputs from this loose ‘collaboration of the willing’. I will also consider potential contradictions and tensions: is there a danger of peatlands becoming another repackaged and instrumentalized object of late capitalism: The Capitalocene Bog (Nolan et al., 2024)? How do we justify further human ‘extraction’ but of environmental, cultural and social, rather than material value?

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