The Half-Life of Memory: Unearthing History as Telluric Praxis

Abstract (English)

After a cancer cluster emerged in a small town in the US Midwest in 1954, community members began to tell a story about red dust containing nuclear fallout that had settled on their town the previous summer. Seventy years later, I draw on fieldwork with soil scientists and archaeologists to examine the process of assessing the presence of historic radiation in the dust today. I highlight myriad challenges related to the practice of “unearthing history” including obtaining land permissions, selecting sites to sample, digging wide enough and deep enough, and correctly calibrating machines used in elemental analysis. The seemingly self-evident questions “What is in the ground?” and “How old is the dirt?” turn out to be vexing telluric problems. Many Western metaphors of truth and discovery – "digging," "revealing," "getting to the bottom of things" – are rooted in unearthing practices. Yet attention to these practices also shows that truth is not buried, waiting to be uncovered, but emerges through often-mundane cultural negotiations. This paper invites a reflection on how the act of searching for irradiated earth from the 1950s – e.g. deciding where to place a shovel, how much dirt to pack into a suitcase – bundles together curiosity and kinship with grief and colonial violence.