Archaeology and Heritage
The area of Germany which became the Soviet Occupation Zone/German Democratic Republic (GDR) bore the brunt of the Soviet offensive of 1945. This last phase of the Second World War on German soil produced a sensational death toll. Yet, a systematic registration of war burials on GDR soil did not take place until the 1970s. This article analyses a particular facet of knowledge production and mass death by turning to the process of accounting for Second World War burials through lists and statistics in the socialist GDR, with a particular focus on key policy changes in the 1970s. Unpacking the reasons which prompted a large-scale registration of war burials some twenty-five years after the end of the war, I argue that the process of accounting for war deaths was shaped by both domestic and foreign politics, and in particular by evolving relations with non-socialist countries. I also demonstrate that international requirements for the visibility and accountability of war burials, as enshrined in the Geneva Conventions, generated tensions with a domestic ‘politics of history’ which required the invisibility of particular categories of dead.
This article intends to shed light on the influence of gas warfare on the management of dead bodies of violence. It shows that this new type of weapon prompted the setting up of new military centres dedicated to forensic research within the French army. This work notably involved carrying out numerous autopsies on the bodies of deceased intoxicated soldiers. By looking at the reports produced and the work of forensic pathologists, the article demonstrates how dead bodies became a site of knowledge production. It also investigates the tensions related to the treatment of dead bodies resulting from this widespread practice of autopsy. The reports produced also provide precise descriptions of the last moments of the soldiers who died in ambulances or hospitals. Finally, by cross-referencing these sources with soldiers’ grave registers, it is possible to grasp the afterlives of autopsied bodies and the diverse fates of soldiers who fell at the front.
This is the first study dedicated to discussing perspectives on proposals to transfuse blood from people killed in conflict zones. It attempts to present a rounded picture of why the idea has apparently failed to translate into practice. Drawing on a range of sources, from scientific research on ‘cadaver’ blood transfusions to discussions around planning for mass casualty events, the article shows how professional interest in the transfusion possibilities of blood taken from the battlefield dead evolved from Soviet research in the 1930s, spread internationally and endured after the Second World War. It then demonstrates that a range of issues, from taboos to practicability, require consideration if past challenges to utility are to be reliably understood. It notes, too, that some early obstacles may, today, be outdated.
This article shows how the medicalisation of death in wartime can be seen as integral to a broader medicalisation of war that it both stems from and sustains. More specifically, it highlights the pivotal role of post-mortem examinations – which were widely performed in French military hospitals during the First Indochina War – in advancing clinical knowledge and monitoring the quality of care, as the only way of providing diagnostic certainty. Pathology procedures also contributed to the introduction of therapeutic innovations, which were largely the result of ongoing interactions both within the armed forces medical service and with the wider military and civilian French and international medical community.
The Hill Fight of the Korean War constitutes an important chapter of the formative military conflict of the mid-twentieth century where the South Korean and other UN forces confronted the Chinese and North Korean forces. Currently, it has become a vital site of contested memory, especially in relation to the growing contest of power between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. Describing South Korea’s recent initiative of missing in action (MIA)/killed in action (KIA) accounting activities on these old battlegrounds since 2000, this article looks at how public actions concerning the remains of war are intertwined with changing geopolitical conditions. This will be followed by a reflection on the limits of the prevailing art and technology of war-remains accounting.
A half-century since its conclusion, the Vietnam War’s ‘work of remembrance’ in the United States continues to generate, even innovate, forms of homecoming and claims of belonging among the state, its military and veterans, surviving families and the wider public. Such commemoration often centres on objects that materialise, physically or symbolically, absence and longed-for recovery or reunion – from wartime artefacts-turned-mementos to the identified remains of missing war dead. In exploring the war’s proliferating memory work, this article examines the small-scale but persistent practice of leaving or scattering cremains at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall in Washington DC, against the backdrop of the US military’s efforts to account for service members missing in action (MIA). Seen together, the illicit and sanctioned efforts to return remains (or artefacts closely associated with them) to places of social recognition and fellowship shed light on the powerful role the dead have in mediating war’s meaning and the debts it incurs.
Following the end of the Vietnam–American War in 1975, the commemoration of the fallen soldiers of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) remains a difficult issue. The post-war Vietnamese state has marginalised ARVN dead from its national commemorative practices, while it has destroyed or neglected former South Vietnam memorial sites. This article provides an examination of recent efforts by local ARVN former combatants, living relatives of fallen soldiers and young Vietnamese to attend to the upkeep of the former ARVN cemetery in southern Vietnam. Based on participant observation and interviews, I explore how people care for the dead through regular acts of grave maintenance and religious rituals. I show that, through these persistent practices of care, southern Vietnamese engage in a form of memory activism to ensure the continual existence of the cemetery and lay claims to the right to mourn for the marginalised dead.
This article details the remarkable involvement of the Vietnamese population in finding and naming half a million Vietnamese missing-in-action (MIAs). The secrecy that characterised Vietnam’s military operations during wartime, and the overlapping claims and therefore control of the MIAs by the army and civil administrations in the aftermath of the wars, are the reasons behind unsolvable quagmires in Vietnam’s current war-accounting effort. The myriad of state actors involved who often work at cross purposes raises the public’s awareness of the incompetence of the state and calls for the participation of non-state actors. The latest potential avenue to solve the MIA problem, DNA forensics, is facing all kinds of challenges, such as the quality of the bone samples and the scale of the effort. War accounting has therefore become an open arena of public engagement and popular dissent, while significantly transforming the cult of the dead in Vietnam.
Despite a growing interest in ‘embodiment’, historians of the body rarely consider the extant material remains of their subject. This chapter seeks to contribute to a discussion about how historians and other scholars might examine the archaeological (and particularly bioarchaeological record) and the historical record together in order to better understand the embodied experiences of people in the past. This chapter offers new ways to study past embodied experiences as an outcome of the material, social and cultural. Focusing on two non-elite individuals from the north of England between 1793 and 1849, it draws on the rich but also incomplete evidence to reconstruct their lives as lived. The first case study explores the themes of risk, youth and masculinity, focusing on James Simpson (1815–34), the son of a currier and leather cutter in Sheffield. This case underscores the advantages of class and gender, as well as the risks of damage posed to young men’s bodies in early nineteenth century towns. The second case study is Ann Purvis (c.1793–1849), a member of a family of river pilots in South Shields. The analysis exposes the vulnerabilities caused to women by poverty and singlehood, as well as the evident care and social status available to such women within the family. The chapter demonstrates that bringing the bioarchaeological, material and historical record together and, in particular, in exploring the tensions between them, produces new knowledge about the lived experiences of non-elite individuals in the past that would otherwise be inaccessible.
While there has been much work on definitions of old age and the experiences of older people in the past, there have been comparatively few studies that explore the physical processes of ageing and the relationship between old age and disability in the working classes of Britain during the Industrial Revolution. Through the combination of osteological, textual and cultural evidence, this chapter reveals how experiences of ageing, and related impairments, were influenced by gender and social status in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The bodily consequences of impairment imparted by industrialised society, and the processes of ageing, are examined in three individual skeletal biographies from Hazel Grove, Stockport and St Hilda’s, South Shields. While impaired bodies have often been viewed as marginal or ‘othered’, official reports, medical sources and social and political commentary suggests that physical difference was an expected and ‘normal’ experience of the working classes. Large proportions of the working population were at risk of impairment by occupational injury, disease and poor living conditions, and this was frequently conceptualised as premature ageing. As such the onset of old age was determined by occupation and, against the backdrop of a sharpening division of labour and economic opportunity, by gender. In this context, the history of old age and the history of disability are inextricably linked. Continued dialogues between osteological and historical researchers can enrich our understanding of marginalised populations, and our own perceptions of who was considered ‘old’ in past societies.