The Archaeology of True Crime
This is shaping up to be the first thing in a potentially ongoing series of writing that explores the weird liminal space I’ve found myself inhabiting for the last decade. I am an archaeologist who works in television production and a producer that goes on archaeological digs. I have one foot in each world, never fully inhabiting either and have found that skills from each world can often translate well to the other. Today we explore: ARCHIVAL.
Part of my job as an archival producer is to handle all the “archival” for a television show. In the TV world, this refers to any kind of audio-visual material, usually photos and videos but sometimes the odd audio file shows up. In the world of True Crime, this often translates to personal items from participants like family photos, videos and well, anything that can help establish who a person was Before. And this is where it gets a bit interesting.
Any criminal case profiled by a television series needs to be fully adjudicated before it can even be considered AND because there are so many competing True Crime shows on multiple networks, teams often need to head back 10, 20, 30 even 40 years to find a case that fits the specific parameters of the series that also hasn’t been recently covered by another show or network. This means the items we end up getting are themselves artifacts from bygone decades like THE NINETIES or even THE EIGHTIES. Printed photos, cassette tapes and VHS tapes, all of which make perfect sense considering the time in which these events took place but are immediately at odds with the 21st century. At the same time, these unfamiliar items are very familiar because they were part of the world that I grew up in and I still remember how to interact with them.
I spend my days scanning photos of childhoods, Christmases and birthdays (always pick them up from the edges so you don’t get fingerprints), locating the lone tape deck in the building so that our post-production team can play and digitize VHS tapes with home movies or taped news broadcasts, puzzling over how we can convert cassette tapes to a useful .mp3 format and delicately handling original newspaper pages that have sat folded for twentysomeodd years. I recently worked with two separate collections of newspaper clippings for two very different topics. One set came from the early nineties and the other from the mid-seventies. The thing that struck me the most was the tactile sensation of handling these paper pages. The newspapers from the nineties were thick, almost cloth-like and the ones from the seventies felt like I was gently unfolding butterfly wings or a forgotten map that in this particular case didn’t lead to a treasure or a lost city but instead followed the ongoing trial of a guy who definitely murdered another guy and yes he did eventually get convicted. The whole practice is fairly mechanical, mostly because the digitization process needs to get done and it needs to get done quickly (as editing and post-production move at a breakneck pace) but I do like to take a few moments with the items I process to actually look at them. The family photos are always bittersweet, especially when you know how the story ends, but the newspapers are always fascinating snapshots of eras that I either missed or was too young to fully comprehend. If that doesn’t correspond directly to archaeology and the experience of being an archaeologist, then I don’t know what does.
