ABSTRACT
This book provides a critical assessment of the places, events, people and things that together constitute the contemporary archaeology of the Cold War era. This was a period – roughly 1946–89 – materially represented by unprecedented developments in weapons technology accompanied by a massive military construction effort. Geopolitical tensions were a defining characteristic, and the Cold War stand-off imposed an apparently permanent global division between communism and capitalism. This is exclusively northern-hemisphere heritage in a way, even though the influence of the Cold War was transglobal, as seen for example in trade networks and the participation in (or boycott of) cultural events – the less tangible legacies of the Cold War era, but a significant dimension nevertheless and one this volume also seeks to address. Here the archaeological record is thus unfiltered by time, or the biases of preservation and social intervention; the archaeological record is essentially complete and wholly representative of the historic era now known as the Cold War.
