Hein B Bjerk

Persistent Memories: Pyramiden -- A Soviet Mining Town in the High Arctic Hein B Bjerk

In 1998 the Russian Arctic Coal Company decided to end its more than 50 years of continuous activity in Pyramiden in the High Arctic archipelago of Norwegian Svalbard. A remarkably abrupt abandonment left behind a mining town devoid of humans but still filled with all stuff constituting a modern industrial settlement. Today the well-equipped Pyramiden survives as a conspicuous Soviet-era ghost town in pristine Arctic nature. Based on fieldwork conducted in 2006, this book explores what things left behind can tell us about how people lived and coped in this marginal town. It is also concerned with Pyramiden's post-human biography and the way the site provokes more general reflections on things, heritage and memory. Challenging the traditional scholarly hierarchy of text over images, this book stands out by using art photography as a means to address these issues and to mediate the contemporary archaeology of Pyramiden.