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Modern Ruins: Remembrance, Resistance, and Ruin Value

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Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology

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Introduction and Definition

The word ruin is an ambiguous and contested one. In our everyday comprehension, it easily brings to mind ancient and enchanted monumental structures, an archaeological dream world featuring celebrities such as Machu Picchu, Pompeii, and Angkor Wat. For centuries, classical and Gothic ruins inspired poets, artists, and scholars, motivated philosophical mediations, and served as instruments of contemplative and aesthetic pleasure. At the same time, the word ruin also has a strong negative tone to it. According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, “To ruin is to inflict or bring great and irretrievable disaster upon, to destroy agency, to reduce to a state of poverty, to demoralize completely” (1964: 1095). In this active verb form, it is almost entirely associated with negative and violent processes, with destruction and demolition (Stoler 2008: 194; Japelli 2012).

While the way we think of ancientruins hardly is affected by these dismal and destructive...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Archaeology, History, Religion and Theology, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway

    Þóra Pétursdóttir

  2. Department of Archaeology, History, Religious Studies and Theology, UiT – The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway

    Bjørnar Olsen

Authors
  1. Þóra Pétursdóttir
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  2. Bjørnar Olsen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Þóra Pétursdóttir .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia

    Claire Smith

Section Editor information

  1. Anthropology Department, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA

    Paul Mullins

  2. Department of Archaeology, University of York, York, UK

    John Schofield

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Pétursdóttir, Þ., Olsen, B. (2020). Modern Ruins: Remembrance, Resistance, and Ruin Value. In: Smith, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30018-0_1055

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