In this paper I outline the commemorative potential of a historical archaeology of aerial bombing. As an affective and challenging archaeology-from-below it offers glimpses of individuality and everyday life amidst the violence of warfare, inscribing shattered buildings and material culture as sites of memory. Firstly I examine the tropes and themes that link archaeology, memory studies and the history of bombing, both in popular imaginations and cultural representations. These include ruins, fragments, depth, wounding, and the contrast between bottom-up and top-down views of the world. I then develop these themes to highlight the tensions between historical and mnemonic narratives of aerial bombardment, the importance of a human centred approach to the commemoration of warfare, and the roles of oral history and archaeology in these processes. Finally I briefly discuss a case study of bombsite archaeology and suggest a valuable application for this technique in the discourses of memory and bombing in contemporary German society.Ruin and fragmentation have been amongst the most powerful and pervasive cultural themes in Western society from at least the Romantic period onwards, serving as allegories, analogies and metaphors for a wide range of social, cultural and natural processes. 1 In this paper I use ruins and fragments as organising concepts to explore the connections between my principal research interests: archaeology, memory, and bombing; specifically the commemorative potential of an archaeology of bombsites.The aerial bombardment of civilian populations is one of the most powerful, iconic and despicable innovations of the recent past. Bombing has played a central role in Gabriel Moshenska, University College London. Correspondence to g. International Journal of Heritage Studies 45shaping the nature of warfare for almost a century, from the first bombs dropped by Italian aircraft on Libya in 1911 to the annihilation of Hamburg and Tokyo and the 'smart bombs' of modern high-tech warfare. 2 My interest in bombing is primarily an archaeological one, studying bombsites, air-raid shelters, and crashed aircraft, as well as the more portable material culture or ephemera of civilian life in wartime. The historical archaeology of these sites and materials leads inevitably to encounters with first-hand memories of the war on the Home Front.Aside from its revolutionary influence in the conduct of warfare, bombing has also had an extraordinary impact on modern culture; the horror of death from the air and the gothic desolation of bombsites have influenced artists and writers including Picasso, Henry Moore and Virginia Woolf. The devastation of aerial bombing featured in science fiction and dystopian visions of the future from as early as 1670. In the 1930s the impersonal destructive potential of the aircraft became a powerful symbol of the dehumanisation of technology in the works of Lewis Mumford, Rex Warner and others. 3 Further reading in and around my three fields of research has left me entangled in a web of sy...
in the ten years since schadla-hall's (1999) outline of the subject, public archaeology has become firmly established as the focus of books, university courses, academic research and a dedicated journal. Nevertheless there is still a degree of uncertainty about the precise definition and delineation of public archaeology. In this short paper I outline my personal perspective of public archaeology as a practice of disciplinary critique focusing on the production and consumption of what I have termed archaeological 'commodities'.
The aim of this article is to situate archaeological approaches to modern conflicts within a framework of conflict memory and commemoration. A critical appreciation of historical archaeology as a commemorative practice requires a firm grounding in memory theory, specifically the formation and contestation of memory narratives. This article offers a detailed analysis of the relevant theories and demonstrates their applicability in the contested archaeology of the Nazi era in Berlin. On the basis of this critique I argue that archaeological work on contested sites offers a unique and powerful forum for socially engaged interdisciplinary research.
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