Archaeo-anthropology of Conflicts in France: From the earlier Middle Ages to the Second World War - Paperback

by Emeline Verna (Editor), Elodie Cabot (Editor), Yves Desfossés (Editor)

This work is the result of a collective research project, Archaeology and Anthropology of Conflicts (2020-2022), which brought together around thirty researchers from various disciplinary backgrounds in anthropology, archaeology, history, and genetics. Its aim was both to inventory sites related to these contexts and to illustrate, through specific cases, the diversity of situations encountered across time and space.

War often leads to extraordinary mortality, raising questions about how the living adapt to the abnormality of death in the management of the deceased. How did survivors, comrades-in-arms, enemies, or even civilians handle corpses, balancing funeral traditions with urgent sanitary concerns?

This volume brings together twenty articles that highlight the wide variety of funerary practices, and presents burial sites ranging from the Early Middle Ages to the twentieth century. These sites are analyzed through both an archaeological and a memorial perspective.