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Paper: My provocation is that by creatively and consciously including material culture - and selecting archaeological and historical methodologies to study, interpret and understand the recent past - we can move beyond the safety of official narratives and instead reveal more experiential understandings of difficult recent pasts. Part of the rationale of using material culture in accessing the recent past is to (1) bypass disciplinary norms, (2) be led by what sources and methods are available to us and (3) allow for us to consciously aim to recover specific, marginalized pasts. I will argue that working with such underpinnings can open up a range of possibilities to explore and make sense of difficult and contested pasts but it will also mean moving through messiness and the need to make choices. This paper will briefly use a number of case-studies related to institutional confinement, political violence, and gendered experiences of the recent past in Ireland, to argue for the importance of often overlooked material culture in unlocking different ways into the past. While acknowledging that by focusing on materials can destabilize established understandings of the past, this paper will demonstrate that not only do materials matter, but they have great potential in revealing previously overlooked and conveniently forgotten pasts.

Dr Laura McAtackney is Professor in Archaeology and Deputy Director of the Radical Humanities Laboratory, University College Cork, Ireland. She is also Docent in Contemporary Historical Archaeology at the University of Oulu, Finland. Her research focuses on material-based approaches to understanding institutions, post-conflict and post-colonial societies, and the politics of how they are remembered. Most recently she was the PI of a DFF-funded project Enduring Materialities of Colonialism: temporality, spatiality and memory on St Croix, USVI (2019-2024).