Sarah Mallet, a TORCH Knowledge Exchange Fellow based at the School of Archaeology at the University of Oxford and researcher for Pitt Rivers Museum's LANDE exhibition has been working with MOLA Post-Excavation Manager, Louise Fowler and MOLA colleagues on the Dzhangal Archaeology Project . Together they have been recording a group of objects collected by the photographer Gideon Mendel at the site of the Calais ‘Jungle’ camp, many of which were displayed in 2017 as part of his exhibition Dzhangal at the Autograph ABP gallery in London. In this blog she her reflects on the project.
Recently, the TV programme Years and Years, which takes place in a dystopic future Britain, showed the situation of migrants trying to cross the English Channel from France. The scenes were an unflinching look at the reality of illegal border crossings, and while it is supposed to take place in the near future, it bears a striking resemblance to current events. The unfairness of the situation is illustrated in all its absurd brutality by the presence of a British character amongst the group of displaced people. Even in a post-Brexit world, he can travel back to Britain relatively easy but choses to stay with the man he loves paying 6,000€ (~ £5,376) for them both to board an unsafe boat. I recently bought return tickets to go to France: it cost me about a hundred times less (£58) for a safe journey in a comfortable train.
Arendt describes in The Origins of Totalitarianism how racism and bureaucracy are interrelated, and nowhere is this more evident than at the borders of the Nation-State. While contemporary archaeology might seem like an oxymoron, archaeological approaches have increasingly been applied to the studies of modern issues. With this archaeological investigation of the material from the ‘Jungle’ refugee camp, we can favour an approach to understand the humanitarian crisis at the UK border in Calais that accounts for the longue durée political and social trends that led to 10,000 people living in a refugee camp in Northern France.
Through archaeological practices and methodologies, the Dzhangal Archaeology Project aims to use material culture to document the politics of exclusion and violence against displaced people at the UK border in France, but also the journeys undertaken and the networks of solidarity and resistance that were established between both countries.
For example, a travel card for public transport in Istanbul found in Calais, or a biro bearing the name of the Italian postal service, ‘Gruppo Poste Italiane’ might be evidence of movement in the present, not unlike a Roman wine amphora in Britain can be evidence of movement in the past.
