The social commemoration of warfare

Special issue on the commemoration, social context and archaeology of warfare; papers include

First World War landscapes are a complex layering of commemorative materialities and spirituality, in which the past is recycled and memory perpetuated in the present. Linking the prehistoric and medieval pasts with the First World War and the present are images of calvaries, crucifixes, and crosses, which appear as landscape monuments and miniature talismanic items of bodily adornment. As icons of sacrifice and remembrance, cruciform imagery focuses attention on the ways in which material culture can transform the lives of those with whom it comes into contact. By drawing together the living and the dead, new commemorative gestures are created in the home as well as on the battlefield

the author argues that academic archaeology of the twentieth century has ignored warfare and violence as relevant aspects of past human activity, but instead has created two commemorative tales about warriors and peasants in the European societies of the Stone and Bronze Ages. These two archaeological tales are claimed to be stereotypes positioned at opposite ends of the scale, which confirm or react against contemporary politics, ideologies, gender hierarchies, and wars. It is argued that the generally weak presence of war and the final breakthrough of war studies in the mid-1990s can be linked to contemporary politics and war, and that they are simultaneously entrenched in two myths about the primitive other, which have persuasively influenced European thought at least since the seventeenth century. The emergence of warfare studies in archaeology can be understood as a social response to the many ethnic-based wars of the 1990s. Through a comparison with the newest anthropology of war it is discussed how the archaeology of war can avoid becoming celebration of war and thus reproduction of the war mythology of the nation state