Paper short abstract:

Historically constituted conceptions of ruins create sites which have now become the focus of local activism which challenges progressivist notions of linear development. The sharing of photographic images on internet sites makes volunteers and visitors purveyors of visual knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

Eighteenth-century attitudes to ruins focused on the decayed grandeur of buildings such as palaces, sumptuous monuments to the dead or other public monuments. However these decayed structures represented not just the remains of architecture. They evoked the generations of people no longer living in what Diderot (1767) called 'la poétique des ruines'. The tumbled ruins were now open to visitors who would have been denied entry when the grand house was occupied. The crumbled walls covered with vegetation, which moved in the wind, afforded the visitor sensory pleasures. They also gave scope for the melancholic consideration of the ambitions of the former occupants who, apparently, desired to raise their house, their lineage (in the sense of Lévi-Strauss's house societies) to a status immortalised in stone. Anne Laura Stoler (2008) contemplated ruins in the sense of 'imperial formations' in order to address new claims and entitlements, in order to discriminate between 'what is residual and tenacious' in reclaiming the waste of such formations. This paper examines locally based activism concerning Fetternear (Scotland). The participation of volunteers and visitors to this archaeological site provides a means for investigating how this activism presents challenges to progressivist notions of development. An important part of that challenge to such notions is provided by the reclamation of knowledge through what Pinney (2008) has termed photography's 'increasingly mobile prosthesis' as visitors to Fetternear become purveyors of knowledge which they share through the internet.