Hidden Heritage: Concealment, Reuse, and Affective Performance in Historic Buildings and Digital Heritage

This article considers material heritage of the Middle Ages and early modern period which was deliberately obscured from public view, exploring this concept in light of concealed objects' emotional impact and cultural meaning, the status of such objects as part of a 'performance of concealment', and the role that concealment played in the creation of heritage. A series of architectural and smaller-scale digital heritage case studies articulate the complex ways that concealment shaped meaningful heritage narratives, both in the past and today—particularly as concealed material culture was often remediated or reused from other heritage settings.

Many of us are familiar with aspects of ritual deposition in premodern contexts, such as high-status metal objects deposited in areas of boggy marshland across northern Europe from the Bronze Age onward, or the placement of shoes or mummified cats within the walls of early modern vernacular buildings.¹ This article extends the fundamental definition of Western ritual deposition to include other meaningful, but largely hidden, sculpture, stonework, and artefacts, which, by nature of their visual concealment, function in many of the same ways as ritually deposited items. In doing so, this article necessarily addresses the concept of concealment from a theoretical perspective, arguing that hidden material culture—in medieval architectural spaces and objects—could transmit ideas, articulate emerging social relations, profess devotional and superstitious beliefs, and demarcate insiders from outsiders in unexpected and meaningful ways.

A series of architectural and object-based case studies from the medieval and early modern period are used to explore these themes. These case studies range from meaningfully placed reused Roman sculpture within Frederick II's enigmatic thirteenth-century Castel del Monte, to Roman foundations deliberately concealed within the twelfth-century Colchester castle. as well as two smaller medieval and early modern artefacts from the Emotions3D online digital heritage collection. These case studies were selected on the basis that they all feature potent histories of architectural or spatially related concealment, as well as associated characteristics of remediation or reuse. All castle sites and portable objects were created or repurposed at times of transitional sociopolitical power relations. In particular (and arguably, as a result), these objects carried deeply symbolic and culturally powerful meanings in addition to being items for everyday use. This article therefore ultimately asserts that hidden things are nonetheless culturally and emotionally potent, and that interactions with an object's concealed status can be interpreted as a form of intangible, performative heritage.

Baruch Spinoza's thesis on affect asserts that material culture in heritage environments can function as 'affectio'—an agent of emotional stimulation—and that people viewing cultural heritage are the 'affectus'—those undergoing the experience of an object's emotional meaning. This aligns with Derrida's definition of the signifier (in this case, cultural heritage) and the signified (its intended meanings), but is further complicated in cases where elements of cultural heritage are deliberately visually concealed. Historically, a sense of 'presence' (or affective strength) in space and place relied on tangible physical manifestation.² When a signifier is somewhat less physically present, or at least obscured, it risks losing meaning. Yet this article posits that inherent signified meaning, and therefore an object's emotional effect, may in fact be greatly amplified by its concealment. As the case studies will demonstrate, hidden objects invert previously understood relationships of intimacy and meaning around physical objects. In some cases, the more hidden something is, the closer the audience engagement with it.³ Anthony Giddens describes this as an ability to be 'absent present', where the disembodiment of a thing from time, place and space, does not detract from its discernible influence.⁴ In fact, an object's meaning may be supplemented or enhanced by the act of concealment, and the process of the concealment creates new and heightened significance for viewers.

This process may be further intensified by the status of concealed artefacts as a form of spolia—material culture that is appropriated from elsewhere and repositioned in new ways to create new meanings.⁵ Nadja Aksamija, Clark Maines, and Phillip Wagoner describe this...