Robert Maxwell

Contemporary archaeology recognises the modern landscape as a material resource. This resource has the ability to challenge assumptions regarding the 20th and 21st centuries based in historiography and memory. In this way it engages with a chronology of historical and prehistoric archaeologies, revealing a continuum which extends into the present day. The 20th century is characterised by its superfluity in the contemporary landscape. The utility of contemporary archaeology lies in its ability to articulate detail from this morass of data. The recent past has the potential to illustrate the complex relationship materiality shares with social constructs of verbal meaning and social action. The architecture of The New Brutalism came to dominate architecture in Britain and Australia for a brief period of time in the late-20th century. As such it is well represented today. Its formal register is one of the most recognisable in its use of raw untreated concrete and lack of ornament, and for this reason it is also one of the most controversial. This thesis aims to address Brutalism as a diagnostic formal type in the modern built landscape. Through the application of material non-correspondence theory, Brutalism is shown to have archaeological validity. The principles of dissonance and inertia and highlighted in the Brutalist case study, and illustrate the direct utility of archaeology in shallow temporal contexts.

For a great many, the final days of the Cold War were marked by a sharp and urgent fear of potential imminent social collapse. The threat of nuclear apocalypse led to a perceived need to preserve documents, materials and communities for future generations. This appears in a striking and diagnostic way during the late 1980s amongst two separate ideological communities – the Church of Scientology (via the Church of Spiritual Technology) began building large-scale fallout shelters and materials repositories during the 1980s, intended to conserve materials for and against the future – or at least a perceived future. The survivalist structures of the Cold War period speak to us from a shared past marked by radiophobia and nuclear paranoia; a time and place which seemed to lead to a very different, Hobbesian 21st century – one in which life would be nasty, brutish and short. In response to this threatening future fallout shelters, deep-earth bunkers and underground repositories began to appear in the landscape. Via an analysis of the landscapes and sites created by the Church of Spiritual Technology  during the Cold War 20th century, human material responses to perceptions of total threat are highlighted and we arrive at what is ostensibly a kind of ‘heritage of a future’. Today, survivalism and bunker construction are both on the rise.  The shelters, bunkers and repositories of the Cold War 20th century then offer a typological and not-too-distant contextual heritage resource from which we may tell a great deal not only about the Cold War period, but ourselves today.

Recent developments in the field of quantum physics have significantly altered previously held notions of materiality. Matter has been observed to be in two states at once (Leggett 1986, 28-40; Silverman 2008). It has been teleported (Cooper 2016) and interacts in ways which were previously within the bounds of science fiction (Matson 2012). Materiality, and the fundamentality of the material, are key ontological positions which both archaeology and quantum theory have, separately and in their own ways, attempted to unpack. Up until now, the fundamentality of the material has been taken as a presupposed condition within archaeology and heritage studies. The material is the truth; the physical record of that which occurred in linear, successive order, throughout time. Quantum theory suggests we are propagating a logical fallacy, and the Many Worlds Interpretation theory (Barrett 1999) holds that all histories occur concurrently, so the study of our own footprint in the past is arbitrary. In this case, the unobservable past takes one more step away from us. Do quantum processes have an impact on the act of archaeology? If so, how does quantum reality impact the human past? Does archaeology reflect our most current understanding of the known universe and our true place in it? This chapter aims to approach these questions, and asks the reader to re‐assess their preconceived notions of time as a one-way street.

An evening with Newtown’s own Robert Maxwell – 5th generation local, Fellow International of The Explorers Club and the only archaeologist to work in Chernobyl and Fukushima.

Come along to a rare public talk by Robert Maxwell, the world’s first archaeologist to work in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

Enter the world of ‘Dark Heritage’, see the ruins of Detroit, the ‘Atom Bomb Trees’ of Hiroshima, and hear tales of working in the world’s most radioactive places.

Join us for a 90 minute talk and Q&A. Fine wines and foods from Parliament’s asylum seeker and refuge team will be available.

Parliament on King, 632 King St, the ‘Paris’ end of King on the thoughtful side of the road, just up from the marvel that is St Peters Station.

The archaeology and significance of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone
ROBERT MAXWELL
(University of Sydney)

The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is an area of some 30-square kilometres surrounding the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. This area includes the city of Pripyat, founded in 1970 and built specifically to house the workforce of the Chernobyl Plant and their families. Outside of the city, over 150 villages existed, some since the Middle Ages, with a local population which had lived in the area for generations.

On 26 April 1986 all of this changed. The Chernobyl Nuclear Accident was the largest release of radioactive material in peacetime during the 20th century, and is till regarded as one of the worst disasters in world history. Its legacy is one which we feel today – in the media, in language and in our gut responses to the worlds ‘nuclear’ and ‘radioactive’. Like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Chernobyl became a diagnostic site. It is a place where history happened.

This paper consists of photographs and accounts from two seasons of field work within the zone, as part of my current PhD project on urban abandonment. My presentation is an archaeological introduction to Chernobyl. Why is the site considered to be archaeology? What does it tell us about the 20th century, and how can we use that information to learn? I hope to answer these questions and give people a new perspective on archaeology.

Within the corpus of discourse on dark heritage, thanatourism and other expressions of the social via the anathematic, the topic of Satan and the concept of Satanism as a resource and field of enquiry is, frankly, nowhere to be found. In a more macro-academic sense, Satanism has failed to garner any significant material-cultural interrogation. It is largely and fallaciously considered to be a prospect significant only of Theological or Psychological penetration. The attention it has received is tokenistic; revolving solely around the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and the methodology of clinical or pseudo-clinical psychological regression. This would seem to be a significant oversight.

However, when Satanism is approached as a network of vernacular ‘dark’ heritage behaviours it reveals itself to be a repository of responses to and products of the milieu of intra-cultural stimuli of the 20th and 21st centuries with a hidden history and heritage spanning millennia This presentation is a work en flaneur intended to be a first-push toward the study of Satan as a secular and heritage-relevant field of enquiry. Via an assessment of Satan as an artefact and expression of intangible heritage significance, the role of Satanism as a scape-goat, and a force of change in the landscape, both material and immaterial, becomes evident. This paper ultimately shows that under heritage terms of discourse, the role of ‘The Devil” in a contemporary sense is very much a postmodern heritage response to a rapidly changing social landscape of behaviour, belief and thought.

This project aims to address the role played by social action and verbal meaning in the formation of the archaeological record. The material and the social shared a layered, nondeterministic relationship characterised by networks of verbal meaning and social action. This process is universal and temporally nondeterministic. Though temporal distance will impact upon the survival of an archaeological resource, it is not a necessary precondition of archaeology. The argument is tested against three sites of recent origin belonging to the Brutalist architectural style in Britain and Australia; a common post-war architectural element in the urban landscape of both countries. Via separate articulation of the social and the material, episodes of socio-material dissonance are identified. These are interpreted via Fletcher’s theory of material non-correspondence in an effort to highlight the archaeological significance of the contemporary cultural resource.

Keywords
Brutalism; Modernism; architecture; non-correspondence; dissonance

The 20th century and early 21st centuries have seen more trauma, upheaval and change than any other period in human history. This is directly represented in the archaeology of the period. As researchers we often intimately engage with these episodes of traumatic change, be it an issue of war, forced migration, epidemic disease, religious violence, nuclear crisis or any number of other catalysts. These events have a direct impact on the physical and mental health of those affected by the event in question; the communities we deal with in person and via the archaeological record.  The impact on the researcher in the field, however, is less recognised. The recent past is an open wound, and engagement with the period can have an increased impact on the researcher. This paper is an exploration of the issue of psychological trauma in the field, with an eye to developing appropriate methodologies and techniques which consider this particular aspect of contemporary studies.

My paper today has come out of a research interest in the causation and expression of what is often referred to in the popular media as " blight " ; urban abandonment and the dereliction of structures and sites, often built within living memory. It also engages with another major research interest, being the archaeology of radioactivity, its significance and diagnosticity in the archaeological record. I have recently completed a chapter on the latter topic for a forthcoming volume on Australian Contemporary Archaeology entitled 'The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off', which is due for print next year via CSP. My doctoral research concerns a multi-scalar analysis of episodes of settlement decline and abandonment in the 20 th century, with particular reference toward the relationship that materiality and ideology share in the creation of the archaeological landscape. I am interested in sites of varying sizes and forms, however all are either completely abandoned or in a state of marked decline. The sites which constitute the dataset vary in physical size, but all are either wholly abandoned or suffer quantifiable settlement decline (a value this research states as being at least 30% of the total site area, or a population decrease of at least 30% during the 20 th century). These sites are the Heygate estate in Southwark, South London, the atomograd of Pripyat within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone Ukraine, and the city of Detroit Michigan, USA. Today I will be discussing the second of the three in the broader context of the Exclusion Zone itself, the surviving archaeology within the zone and the ways in which Chernobyl has impacted the region, both physically and psychologically. I would like to preface the field material by stating that I adhere to a definition of our discipline wherein archaeology constitutes the evidential product of human interaction with the material. In this sense human archaeology refers to anything with a material expression

When Soviet filmmaker Vladimir Shevchenko took his camera onto the roof of Chernobyl’s reactor four in the aftermath of the fatal explosion, he had no idea he was right in the middle of what was — in April 1986 — the most dangerous place on earth.

He also had no idea that his chilling documentary Chernobyl: Chronicle of Difficult Weeks, about the clean-up of the radioactive material at Chernobyl, would be his very last.

He died of acute radiation sickness a year later.

In 1986 a nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl Power Plant in Ukraine exploded, leaving the nearby city of Pripyat derelict when a 30km exclusion zone was put in place.

Reports suggest about 4000 people died as a result of the nuclear explosion, leaving the city abandoned.

Tourists can visit the exclusion zone but are subject to strict safety precautions.

American HBO mini-series Chernobyl is the channel’s top-rated series, garnering international attention.

Australian archaeologist Robert Maxwell is the only archaeologist to visit the exclusion zone.

He tells Chris Smith the city will never be restored, but believes it should become a “historic park”.

“It’s an eerie sensation to stand in a city that was formally a population of approaching 50,000 and really quite frozen in time.

“Once you do look at the circumstances that led to the explosion, and then the response to the event itself, you start to realise that not only was it a nuclear disaster but it was really a psychological disaster of the 20th century.”

More than three decades after the Chernobyl disaster, the Ukrainian town made headlines all over the world again after entertainment giant HBO released a five-part mini-series about the nuclear catastrophe.

The Chernobyl series was such a hit it brought an unprecedented wave of visitors to the town’s exclusion zone, with some social media influencers publishing sexy images taken on the site.

6PR producer and WAtoday photojournalist Marta Pascual Juanola joins Jane in the studio to share her experience visiting Chernobyl in October 2018.

Contemporary archaeologist, radiation and Chernobyl expert Robert Maxwell also joins the conversation to talk about the history of the catastrophe and the future of its ground zero.

Many of us grow up dreaming of becoming an explorer of some sort; whether it’s an astronaut, a deep-sea diver, or maybe, an archaeologist. Popular perceptions of all of these are often incredibly distorted, influenced by films and T.V shows like Indiana Jones. Regardless, there are many people who follow through with these dreams, and become the sort of explorer we’re used to seeing on the big screen. One such person is Robert Maxwell, the ‘Radioactive Archaeologist’; the only archaeologist to have worked in Chernobyl and Fukishima, a recently inducted Fellow International of the Explorers Club, and member of the Satanic Temple. Robert is dedicated to approaching archaeology from an anthropological/sociological perspective in an attempt to help develop our understanding of societal collapses, and he joined 2SER producer Rhiannon Williams to discuss some of his work.

Since the release of HBO’s miniseries Chernobyl, there’s been a great deal of discussion about its historical accuracy.

We know that in the early hours of April 26, 1986, a safety test at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine malfunctioned.

What followed was a series of explosions so powerful they equated to 500 nuclear bombs being projected into the atmosphere.

But what really happened to the men and women closest to it? Was radiation sickness as widespread as presented in the series?

"A DIGGER claw believed to have been used in the clean-up of Chernobyl is still lying abandoned in a forest - and experts fear it is so radioactive a single touch could KILL you.

"Radiation expert Rob Maxwell stumbled across the ultra-radioactive machinery on a tour of Pripyat, Ukraine in 2011."

The Claw sits alone in a dead pocket of a forest on the outskirts of Pripyat, where it was abandoned in the aftermath of the clean-up efforts following the 1986 disaster.

Workers, unsure of where to leave the highly radioactive claw, dumped the frightening piece of machinery in the depths of the forest, far from the beaten track, in the hope nobody would ever find it — it was simply deemed too dangerous to leave anywhere else.

But while the Claw isn’t easy to find, a handful of official guides know where it’s located. Even so, very few tourists request permission from Ukrainian officials to get close to the highly contaminated claw.

A digger claw found abandoned in remote woodland was used in the clean-up of Chernobyl , experts say.

The machinery is believed to still be so radioactive a single touch could kill, even more than 33 years after the nuclear disaster.

Rob Maxwell, a radiation expert, stumbled across the massive claw during a tour of Pipryat, Ukraine.

"It’s severely, potently lethal," he said.

"This discarded digger claw lies abandoned in a forest near the Chernobyl site and experts fear it could be fatal to touch. It is one of a number of vehicles used in the nuclear disaster clean-up that have had to be ditched because they are so contaminated. Radiation expert Rob Maxwell stumbled upon the machinery on a tour of Pipryat (sic), Ukraine, during a visit."

Portrait of Robert Maxwell, First Fleet Descendant

Ancestor’s name
John Cross

Ancestor’s conviction
Stealing a sheep

Ancestor’s sentence
7 years transportation

Ancestor’s age
29 years old when convicted

Date of arrival
1788

Name of ship
Alexander, First Fleet