Antiquity Editorial June 2021
Robert Witcher2021, Antiquity
https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2021.60In the novel Cold earth a group of archaeologists on fieldwork in a remote part of Greenland find themselves isolated after a global pandemic severs communications with the wider world.1 At first, the lack of news allows the team to focus on their excavation of a Norse settlement. Soon, however, the uncertainty about what might or might not be happening to family and friends back home leads the group's members to confront their own pasts—and one another. Published back in 2009, a decade on, the novel assumes an eerie resonance in the era of COVID-19. In the real world, the current pandemic may have caught a small number of archaeologists in isolated locations, but for most of us—as for the wider population—the experience of a global virus outbreak has been the exact opposite of that of the novel's protagonists: we have been socially and physically isolated at home with an excess of news flooding in from all around the world. Nonetheless, where the novel and reality align is in the impact of these different forms of isolation and uncertainty on the mind and mental health.
