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¡°Contemporary Archaeology begins with the commitment that the more carefully we attend to objects, buildings and landscapes, the more human our account of the world may become.¡±

That bold ideal for their discipline is at the heart of a new book titled Lande: The Calais ¡°Jungle¡± and Beyond, by Dan Hicks, professor of contemporary?archaeology at the University of Oxford, and postdoctoral researcher Sarah Mallet. It accompanies and is with all royalties going to L¡¯Auberge des Migrants, which has aided displaced people in Calais since 2008.

The book notes the terrible story of ¡°the transformation of [a] large open site of sandy wasteland on the industrial eastern edge of town, a state-owned former rubbish dump lying between the road and the sea, into an ultra-militarised landscape of encampments, barriers, violent conflict and the regime of ¡®deterrence¡¯¡±, where ¡°at its peak more than 10,000 displaced people lived¡±. It considers the significance of Calais as ¡°the largest European passenger port, carrying 30?million passengers via Eurostar and ferries in 2017¡±, and which ¡°still handles 17 per cent of all UK trade with the world¡±.

But it also puts what happened in the Jungle into a number of wider contexts. Until an agreement made in the 1560s, Calais was essentially ¡°England¡¯s last overseas possession on the European mainland¡± and ¡°its last pre-colonial overseas possession, the withdrawal from which was a key moment in the emergence of the new oceanic geographies of empire¡±. While believing that ¡°Britain¡¯s fantasies about its imperial past are increasingly wild and self-delusional¡±, the authors seek to ¡°bear witness to the border as an ongoing (post)colonial technology¡±. Most asylum seekers in Britain, they remind us, ¡°come from regions that were formerly part of the British empire¡±, with those displaced at Calais coming ¡°overwhelmingly¡± from ¡°just four states: Afghanistan, Sudan, South Sudan, and Eritrea (with some smaller but significant numbers of Somalians)¡±.

Even more disturbingly, Hicks and Mallet argue that the Jungle may be a sign of a more general trend, citing a researcher called Cyrille Hanappe to the effect that ¡°the most rapidly developing urban model is that of the precarious city¡­nearly a third of the world¡¯s population will live in such neighbourhoods by 2030¡±.

And what of the responsibility of academics? Although anthropology (exemplified not least by museums such as the Pitt Rivers) is ¡°the discipline that has been closest to the ongoing colonial project¡±, Lande sees scope for it to reinvent itself ¡°as an anti-racist discipline¡± that?¡°can not only relativise and historicise borderwork, but can also resist it and Fascist nativism too internationally¡±. Along with this goes ¡°a responsibility to continue to make visible the inhuman treatment of displaced people on European soil and at its walls¡±.

For their fellow archaeologists, meanwhile, Hicks and Mallet claim ¡°there can be no more urgent task¡­than to excavate and advocate for the undocumented present¡±.