Unearthing Collections
Archives, time and ethics
Magdalena Buchczyk (Editor), Martín Fonck (Editor), Tomás J. Usón (Editor), Tina Palaić (Editor)
Unearthing Collections invites readers to reconsider the ethics of collections and archives through the lens of temporality. Drawing on case studies that range from community protests over glacial sampling to the ethical dilemmas of housing human remains in museum collections and acquiring ephemeral political art, the authors interrogate the urgent challenges of collecting, displaying and preserving traces.
The book is framed around the concept of ‘unearthing’, the process of revealing hidden truths, excavating layers of history, and uncovering the unknown. It explores how the pursuit of knowledge often comes at the cost of displacement, exploitation, commodification, and the enduring legacies of imperialism and colonialism.
Alongside critique of the extractive practices that shaped many collections and archives, the book proposes a shift towards ‘re-earthing’, a practice that reconfigures how we understand and engage with knowledge about traces. As a critical approach, re-earthing acknowledges the messy, entangled nature of traces of the past, rejecting attempts to purify or control them in collections and archives, so they may evolve into new forms of knowledge. This innovative perspective challenges scholars, archivists, artists, and collection practitioners to rethink their approach to time and trace, urging them to disrupt dominant chronologies and cultivate new ethical approaches for working with collections and archives.
List of figures
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Re-earthing traces: rethinking ethics in collections and archives through the lens of temporality Magdalena Buchczyk, Martin Fonck, Tomás J. Usón and Tina Palaić
Part I: Durabilities
1 Of networks and molecules: reflections on ephemerality, museum practice and webs of relation after disappearance
Lee Douglas
2 Inside the climatic cube: the ideology of preservation
Pablo Martínez
3 Buddhism, death and thermodynamics: decentring the language of conservation expertise
Ayesha Fuentes
4 Film archives and energy: tracing heritage policies between land colonisation and collective agency
Alberto Berzosa
5 Ice as trace: correspondences and conflicts around earthly archives in the Cordillera Blanca, Peru Tomás J. Usón and Sandra Jasper
Part II: Occlusions
6 Medical wax moulages and regimes of looking and overlooking
Órla O’Donovan and Róisín O’Gorman
7 A ‘rare and invaluable’ gift: indigenous bodies, academic prestige and anthropological practices
Diego Ballestero
8 Reimagining the habitat diorama for the Anthropocene
Susanne Kass
Part III: Crystallisations
9 Miners’ film workshop: opening the archive of Ateliers Varan
Miguel Errazu, Miguel Hilari and Isabel Seguí
10 Decolonising museums in East-Central Europe: case studies of Poland, Czechia, Slovenia and Croatia
Tina Palaić, Anna Remešová, Magdalena Zych and Marija Živković
11 Collecting your own past: bottom-up museums and the moral economy of collections
Miguel Mesa del Castillo and Juan Manuel Zaragoza Bernal
Afterword: Re-earthing the past
Pratik Chakrabarti
Index
DOI: 10.14324/111.9781800089501
Publication date: 24 November 2025
PDF ISBN: 9781800089501
EPUB ISBN: 9781800089518
Hardback ISBN: 9781800089488
Paperback ISBN: 9781800089495
Magdalena Buchczyk (Editor)
Magdalena Buchczyk is Junior Professor of Social Anthropology of Cultural Expressions at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
Martín Fonck (Editor) 
Martín Fonck is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer at the Department of Science, Technology and Society, Technical University of Munich.
Tomás J. Usón (Editor)
Tomás J. Usón is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer at the Institute of Geography of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
Tina Palaić (Editor)
Tina Palaić is Head of the Curatorial Department at the Slovene Ethnographic Museum in Ljubljana.
Unearthing Collections
Magdalena Buchczyk, Martín Fonck, Tomás J. Usón, Tina Palaić,
24 November 2025
Critical Heritage Studies and the Futures of Europe
Rodney Harrison, Nélia Dias, Kristian Kristiansen,
24 October 2023
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