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REVIEW BY NICHOLAS SAUNDERS
The past 25 years have seen a revolution in our understanding of war (especially modern war), due partly to the shift from a solely military-history approach to an interdisciplinary one incorporating archaeology, anthropology, and scientific-technological advances. The change in the name of this field from ‘battlefield archaeology’ to ‘conflict archaeology’ recognises several components: one focuses on the social-cultural study of material culture and landscape, while another concerns the scientific-forensic study of human remains and funerary events – ‘archaeo-anthropology’. This book concerns the latter, offering French case studies from the Middle Ages to the late 19th century, then mainly WWI subjects.
Tying together these fascinating, disparate studies is a focus on studying human remains across conflicts regardless of historical period. This is an undoubted strength, though it is also true that WWI brought devastating new ways of maiming and killing, and indeed atomising, the human body, which in turn affected how the war dead were located, regarded, and treated.
The earliest study covers 9th-century Carolingian warfare and associated literary sources that discuss military engagements and the role of the dead in light of Christian beliefs. This is illuminating because archaeological evidence is scarce, yet we learn that common soldiers were buried in anonymous mass graves while the elite ended up in churches and monasteries.
Particularly intriguing is the study of the 1424 Battle of Verneuil – the ‘second Agincourt’ – where 9,800 English soldiers crushed a French army twice its size. Investigators focused on landscape and material remains in an attempt to clarify differing historical interpretations. No excavation was possible, and no grave locations were known, so a topographical battlefield map was made and ‘populated’ by artefacts from a local museum, followed by a close reading of historical sources. There is an insightful account of a military ‘crisis cemetery’ at Anzin-St-Aubin (Pas-de-Calais), where 22 graves from the end of the 15th century were found. No historical sources mention the event, but lead bullets from the period were found with some bodies.
Another investigation deals with mass graves from the 1793 Battle of Le Mans and also offers a rare chance to study the remains of French soldiers killed at the 1870 Battle of Reichshoffen-Wörth. Most of these pre-20th-century case studies are brief, but they indicate subjects for future research.
The WWI studies are equally compelling, emphasising how far our knowledge has advanced in recent decades. This is apparent in the retrospective assessment of 6,000 artefacts used to help identify 250 Australian and British soldiers found in a mass grave at the 1916 battle-site of Fromelles, excavated in 2009. As the authors state, it is the first and only project to use artefacts to identify historic mass burials, combining DNA analysis, anthropology, and historical research. Key to this study was ‘scoring’ objects not for their social history value but rigorously only for identifying bodies. In a separate study, cross-disciplinary expertise identified the remains of a British soldier found in 2019 at the edge of the Commonwealth cemetery at Héninel. Identified subsequently as Private Herbert Greaves of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, it appears he was buried at the edge of the original cemetery and overlooked when an extension was built.
This is a valuable, insightful, and timely snapshot of one kind of conflict archaeology in France, available in English – though a more substantial introduction and conclusion would have been welcome. More surprising, given its broad multidisciplinary aims, is that there is hardly a mention of the huge literature on archaeological-anthropological study of modern conflict material culture and landscape published in English over the past 25 years.
Archaeo-anthropology of Conflicts in France: from the earlier Middle Ages to the Second World War
Emeline Verna, Elodie Cabot, Yves Desfossés, and Michel Signoli (eds)
BAR Publishing, pbk, £25
ISBN 978-1407362892
