The papers in this first issue of the 12th volume of this journal are all on topics associated with the Second World War. The first paper (by Seitsonen, Herva, Nordqvist, and Herva) is a report on the excavation of a Prisoner of War work camp in Arctic Finland, the first German camp in Finland to be excavated. The Arctic north is a very different environment to that of most of Europe, and accordingly the camps demonstrate features uncommon to other German prisoner of war camps. The paper goes beyond a mere excavation report to show some of the real potential of Conflict Archaeology by tracing the lines of distribution into the camp of material from across Europe. It is a tremendous piece of research that both demonstrates what can be done with Conflict Archaeology, and the research potential of prisoner of war camps. It is also a welcome paper on the less martial aspects of Conflict Archaeology, looking at the archaeology beyond the battlefield.
The second paper (by Marter, Visser, Alders, Röder, Gottwald, Mank, Hubbard and Recker) is an account of the excavation of a Halifax bomber shot down in March 1944 over Germany. Most aircraft excavations to date have been carried out by enthusiasts, with variable quality of recording and commitment to understanding the details of the crash. This excavation combined metal detector survey with traditional archaeological excavation techniques to provide information that was sufficient to allow reconstruction of the shooting down and crashing of the aircraft. The paper is a useful contribution to the developing sub-discipline of aviation archaeology as it shows just how much material can be recovered through careful excavation, and underlines that aircraft wrecks from the twentieth century should not be abandoned to trophy hunters, but should be treated as any other aspect of the historic environment.
The final paper in the issue (by Dave Passmore, David Capps-Tunwell, Martijn Reinders and Stephan Harrison) is another aspect of the archaeology of the Second World War behind the frontline. The research looks at the fuel dumps and ammo stores of north-west Europe, providing a very useful typology of such sites that can be used across Western Europe. The team responsible for this research has provided a series of papers over the past few years both in this journal and in others on the ephemeral Second World War remains still surviving in forested environments, and this contribution adds to that corpus of material that is now available for the long-term benefit of other researchers.
This final paper works particularly well with the first paper, as both look at the material which was a part of the daily lived experience of soldiers and PoWs during the Second World War. Both papers resulted from projects dealing with the traces of the Second World War that survive in woodlands and on marginal ground that have remained largely untouched since the war. Whereas the towns and fields of Europe have lost many of the traces of war, the ‘marginal’ areas away from the core of modern life still preserve the abandoned material of soldiers’ lives. In this sense, there is a connection with the second paper, where the fieldwork recovered a range of personal items from the flight crew, despite their bodies having been recovered decades previously. All three papers, then, deal with the ephemera of warfare, the material that people used every day, the sites that were part of the background of warfare.
Conflict Archaeology at its best is all about taking these ephemeral traces of war and teasing out the details of life and death in a way that only comes through an holistic approach that uses all available forms of evidence available. Conflict Archaeology is an example of the strengths of the multi-disciplinary approach, and a useful reminder to historians of the ability of archaeology to engage with the personal, and to archaeologists of the potential of recent historical events for contributing important material culture.
Glasgow
December 2017