Artefacts

Objects the archive holds rather than places it has surveyed or people it has catalogued.

Songs, photographs, documents, printed notices, propaganda, recordings: the material the Wasteland produced about itself. Some of it was made to be kept. Most of it was not, and survives because somebody could not bring themselves to throw it away.

Where an artefact concerns a person or a place already on file, the record here carries the object and the record there carries the subject. Both are kept, because they are not the same thing: a photograph of a crew is not the same record as the station they worked at, and a song about a pump is not the same record as the pump.

Held

• Collected songs, in circulation

  Songs for the Long Repair

  Eleven working songs gathered under Dr. Borschtovsky's name. Doors kept open, fires kept lit, pumps kept running. No army appears anywhere in them.

• Printed plates, eight held

  Facility 862-B Posters

  Instructional, not triumphal. No plate depicts a weapon or names an enemy. One has been answered by hand, decades later.

• Photographic plates, six held

  Photographs of an Undocumented War

  A campaign fought in north Wales in the early nineteen-eighties, against an enemy almost nothing else on file mentions. Two of the men in them have since been identified, and are still alive.

• Magnetic tape, one copy

  Nuclear Survival in the U.K.

  A restricted government film teaching a country how to live through a nuclear attack. Made in advance of one. Nothing establishes that the war it prepares for is the war that came.

Archive notes

• Artefacts are filed by object. The subject they concern keeps its own record.
• Provenance is recorded where it can be established and marked unestablished where it cannot.
• An artefact's internal details are measured from its own time, not from this one.