In February 2020, Oxford University Press published Rosemary A.Joyce, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, the future of nuclear waste: what art and archaeology can tell us about securing the world. Most hazardous material (translated by the author as "the future of nuclear waste: what art and archaeology can teach us about protecting the world’s most harmful materials"). Joyce also wrote a book called Ancient Bodies, Ancient Life: Sex, Gender and Archaeology, and she co-edited the Cambridge Archaeological Manual with other scholars.
In order to answer the question of how to ensure that nuclear waste buried in the ground will not be disturbed by human beings for thousands of years to come, the practice of the US government is to convene an expert consultation meeting. In 1980s and 1990s, the United States held two consultation meetings, in which 29 American experts (including experts in the fields of materials science, communication, futurology and archaeology) participated.
Joyce carefully read all the reports produced by these two consultation activities, and sorted out the suggestions of experts and the plans approved by the government. The plan is to design a modern monument and artificially build a "ruin" to make it an archaeological site, so that no one will explore here in the future.
A design scheme discussed at that time was demonstrated as follows: since some archaeological sites and relics, such as Stonehenge in England, Snake Hill in Ohio, Rosetta Stone in ancient Egypt, New Granci Tomb in Ireland, and rock painting sites in Spain and Australia, can survive to this day and be regarded as treasures, contemporary engineers can also build some monuments in the nuclear waste disposal site, and their messages can last longer than those conveyed by the above archaeological sites, so that future generations can know them.
The idea of another design scheme (not considered by government planners) is that the design prototype with universal significance can arouse similar emotional reactions in the minds of people in different ages and regions.
Both schemes pay attention to common sense and think that people’s reaction and cognition to things are relatively predictable. Their plan takes into account all relevant aspects, including aesthetic issues and environmental protection issues.
Joyce used the method of "common sense anthropology" to analyze why the experts who participated in the consultation relied on some generalizations, but the history of the protection and interpretation of archaeological sites and the close analogy of prototype-based design (some large-scale installation works produced in the "Earth Art Movement") did not conform to these generalizations.
Joyce said that she tried to understand what people in different groups accepted without thinking. Her analysis shows that the demonstration of the markers of nuclear waste disposal sites depends to a great extent on common sense rather than professional knowledge. For example, when discussing "how can we better understand the long-distance traces left by human beings on the landscape", her solution is "to regard the past, the present and the future as mutually constituted, but they have no decisive influence on each other, and always be prepared to face some emergent understandings, which have changed the way we accept the material world in which we live".
This book reveals some imaginations shared by consultants, government planners and artists, who all regard the western United States as a vast space suitable for arranging such projects. Joyce shattered the above imagination with the dissenting voices of indigenous scholars and indigenous activists who opposed the construction of nuclear waste disposal sites in the local area.
In a word, this book shows how a deep understanding of the distant past can contribute to the critical debate around today’s things.
Cornelius Holtorf, an assistant professor at the Institute of Archaeology and Ancient History in Lund University, Sweden, published a review of this book in the third issue of Technology and Culture this year.
The article says that archaeology has always been concerned about two kinds of relationships, one is the relationship between things and technology, and the other is the relationship between culture and society. Professor Joyce’s book analyzes the decision-making process of a major technical challenge in contemporary society: considering the needs of future generations in 1 million years, how to dispose of nuclear waste, a long-lived and high-radiation radioactive waste?
Holtorf believes that the breadth of Joyce’s monograph is rare. The book not only discusses theoretical issues, but also lists materials in terms of materials, time and space. Joyce is keen on discussing the archetypes of contemporary art, indigenous politics and meaning, as well as semiotics and memory. The cases she introduced spanned many continents and archaeological periods, involving not only archaeological remains, but also art, portable relics and texts.
Joyce’s "indigenous politics" situation is that some places in some countries have been proposed as suitable nuclear waste disposal sites, so what do local indigenous scholars and activists think of this proposal? In particular, she provided detailed background on the motion to build a nuclear waste disposal site in Yucca Mountain, Nevada, USA. This matter has been controversial for decades. The latest development I know is that when the US Secretary of Energy visited Nevada in June this year, he said that he would no longer consider the plan of building a nuclear waste disposal site in Yucca Mountain.
Holtorf said that Joyce did a good job in academic kung fu. There are 27 pages of references listed in this book, and there are more than 1000 footnotes, which add up to 50 pages. With such efforts, this book seems to be killing the chicken with an ox knife. But the author believes that this is the advantage of this book, not the disadvantage.
China Science Journal (Book Review, 7th Edition, September 16th, 2021)