Conflict Archaeology
To
Discover
And
Understand.
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Some reasons for doing conflict archaeology
The systematic study of battlefield sites can establish a close
approximation of exactly what took place at that particular site.
The residues of conflict , e.g. skeletal material in mass graves –
can serve as a powerful tool to prevent the glorification of wars
and conflict.
Physical evidence recovered by archaeology can expose
distortions of the truth or the use of state propaganda.
Survey and assessment can document sites and provide
management strategies for the long term preservation of
significant these cultural resources
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What has been studied?
• Fortifications from ancient forts and medieval castles to
nuclear bunkers
• Battlefields of all periods and of the two types siege and
transitory
• Mass graves
• Ship wrecks and plane crash sites
• Prisoner of war camps
• Cold War surveillance sites and nuclear weapon testing
sites
• Peace Camps
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Ground Zero after 9/11
• The destruction of the twin towers and US response
coalesced around the archaeological concerns of
conservation, garbage, classification, composition, and
decomposition.
• Archaeology is ever more clearly a way of negotiating
loss due to the affective power of the material trace
recognisable as ‘haunting’ or ‘enchantment’ and excess
behaviour
Shanks, Platt, Rathje (2004) The Perfume of garbage: modernity
and the archaeological. MODERNISM/modernity 11 (1): 61-83
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The first global industrialized conflict…
Participants in World War I
- Allies in green
- Central Powers in orange
- neutral in grey
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Dynastic alliances among ruling elites + industrialized
economies + new technologies + nationalism
= warfare and destruction on an unprecedented scale
What made WW I so different was the long-term impact of the
Industrial Revolution, with its accompanying political and social
changes.
- this was the first mass global war of the industrialised age, a
demonstration of the prodigious strength, resilience and killing
power of modern states.
- the war was fought at a high point of patriotism and belief in the
existing social hierarchy; beliefs that the war itself helped destroy,
and that the modern world finds very hard to understand.
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Military aspects of WWI
WW I is often characterized as a protracted stalemate of trench warfare
along the Western Front, embodied within a system of opposing manned
trenches and fortifications separated by a "No man's land"
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The Western Front
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- but WWI also included much fighting at sea
- the first fighting in and out of the air
- and the first use of tanks
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Trench Warfare
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The scale of the destruction that was unleashed shocked
contemporary observers; whole landscapes were obliterated
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And changed the nature of warfare and the human condition
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The Dead Poets
Rupert Brooke
Sub-Lieutenant
Born: 1887
Died: 1915
Aged: 28 years
Wilfred Owen
Lieutenant
Born: 1893
Died: 1918
(one week before the
Armistice)
Aged : 25
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Siegfried Sassoon
Second Lieutenant
Born: 1886
Died: 1967
Aged: 81
Casualties: each flag = 100,000 dead (skulls are civilian dead)
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Political implications
WW I created a decisive break with the old world order that had
emerged after the Napoleonic Wars in continental Europe
Three European land empires were shattered and subsequently
dismembered to varying degrees:
- the German,
- the Austro-Hungarian
- the Russian
Three European imperial dynasties also fell
- the Hohenzollern
- the Habsburgh
- the Romanov
In addition, the Ottoman Empire fell in the Balkans and the Middle East
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The war to end
all wars?
- more than 9 million soldiers died on the various battlefields, and nearly
as many more died in the participating countries' home fronts on account
of food shortages, civil wars, and internal conflicts
- in World War I, only some 5% of the casualties (directly caused by the
war) were civilian
- in World War II, this figure approached 50%.
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Can WWI be studied archaeologically?
Nicholas Saunders
University of Bristol
‘Archaeology and war have an enduring and ambiguous
relationship – both create in the very act of destroying’
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Nicholas Saunders
‘Great War archaeology is a complex endeavour. In one sense,
it is a kind of industrial archaeology, whose strata are saturated
with mass-produced artefacts of the 20th century – an
overwhelming sea of materiality that seems to
mock the archaeologist’s quest for meaningful patternings of
objects. In another sense, it is historical archaeology, informed
by a wealth of written documents on every conceivable aspect
of the conflict, from trench life to global
military strategy, from the personal meanings of memorabilia to
the international consequences of its aftermath. It is also social
archaeology, public archaeology, and anthropological
archaeology….’
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Saunders identifies four phases in the development of WWI archaeology
1.
1914-1918
much archaeology unearthed by all the trench digging and hybrid layers
created
2.
1919-1990
re-colonisation of landscapes, creation of cemeteries, some digging in France
and Belgium, but little more than amateur looting to retrieve objects
3.
1990-2001
creation of battlefield archaeology amateur societies such as ‘The Diggers’
active in Belgian Flanders; in France British teams working on sites
4.
2002-present
professionalisation of Great War archaeology in Belgium, and the advent of
television archaeology in France and Belgium
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The Western Front is a multi-vocal landscape:
An industrialized slaughter house, a vast tomb for
Missing
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The
- a landscape of memorialization for pilgrimage
Thiepval Memorial,
to the missing
The Somme
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-a location for archaeological
Investigation
Cross Roads site, near Ypres,
investigated by the Department of
First World War Archaeology,
supported by the Belgian Government
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Cross Roads site
Passcendaele battlefield of July and August 1917
excavated ahead of new A19 motorway
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Cross Roads site: Remains of a British soldier
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Cross Roads site
Equipment and shoulder badge, Royal Sussex Regiment
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The ‘Grimsby Chums’
Mass grave of 24 British soldiers from the Lincolnshire
Regiment, excavated at Le Point du Jour, outside Arras, in
2001
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-a landscape for cultural heritage development and tourism
French Ossuary and cemetery at Douaumont, Verdun
Ossuary contains remains of 130,000 French & German soldiers
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- A multi-ethnic and multi-faith war
Troops from Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand,
China, the Caribbean, and the Americas fought in the
Allied armies in the Western Front, and other theatres
of war
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The forging of modern national consciousness:
Canadian WWI poster
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In Flanders Fields by John McCrae
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
On 2 May, 1915, in the second week of fighting during the Second Battle of Ypres
Lieutenant Alexis Helmer was killed by a German artillery shell. He was a friend of the
Canadian military doctor Major John McCrae. It is believed that John McCrae began
the draft for his famous poem 'In Flanders Fields' that evening.
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Canadians at Vimy Ridge
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Canadians at Vimy Ridge
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Canadians at Vimy Ridge
Female figure representing Canada at Vimy Ridge
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-webs of meaning and materiality that link communities
around the world
The Cenotaph. Whitehall. London
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Royal Artillery Memorial, Hyde Park
Prior to WWI military memorials usually celebrated the victories of great men,
e.g. Nelson's Column
The losses of the 1914-18 war marked a turning point in memorial design, as
the sacrifice of ordinary individuals began to be commemorated.
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Trench Art –
a personal and creative response to the horror of modern war
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Finally, when re-enactments of
past conflicts are becoming
common place, and more and
more people are dressing up often with scant regard for truth
and or morality - archaeologists
need to work hard to establish
factual accounts of conflict that
prevent the past from being misused in the present.
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