More than two thousand people from the British Channel Islands were deported to and interned in Germany during the Second World War, making up as many as 60% of all interned British citizens in occupied territory during this period. This book carries out an in-depth analysis of artwork, objects, oral testimonies, archives, poetry, letters, diaries and memoirs gathered from the internees and drawing from around one hundred collections. The work is based on over 15 years of research and interviews with more than 65 former internees, and explores analytical themes and narratives of placemaking, resistance, communities, food and cooking. It also proposes new concepts and categories to help us understand objects that distinguish the experience of internment. This book will be of great value for scholars and museum professionals, as well as postgraduate students in the field of Conflict Archaeology and scholars of the Second World War. Cumulatively, this materiality comprises one of the major surviving assemblages of internees to emerge from the war, comparable in size, quality and importance with that from other theatres of war.

The internment of civilian and military prisoners became an increasingly common feature of conflicts in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Prison camps, though often hastily constructed and just as quickly destroyed, have left their marks in the archaeological record. Due to both their temporary nature and their often sensitive political contexts, places of internment present a unique challenge to archaeologists and heritage managers. As archaeologists have begun to explore the material remains of internment using a range of methods, these interdisciplinary studies have demonstrated the potential to connect individual memories and historical debates to the fragmentary material remains. Archaeologies of Internment brings together in one volume a range of methodological and theoretical approaches to this developing field. The contributions are geographically and temporally diverse, ranging from Second World War internment in Europe and the USA to prison islands of the Greek Civil War, South African labor camps, and the secret detention centers of the Argentinean Junta and the East German Stasi. These studies have powerful social, cultural, political, and emotive implications, particularly in societies in which historical narratives of oppression and genocide have themselves been suppressed. By repopulating the historical narratives with individuals and grounding them in the material remains, it is hoped that they might become, at least in some cases, archaeologies of liberation.

This book focuses on the numerous examples of creativity produced by POWs and civilian internees during their captivity, including: paintings, cartoons, craftwork, needlework, acting, musical compositions, magazine and newspaper articles, wood carving, and recycled Red Cross tins turned into plates, mugs and makeshift stoves, all which have previously received little attention. The authors of this volume show the wide potential of such items to inform us about the daily life and struggle for survival behind barbed wire. Previously dismissed as items which could only serve to illustrate POW memoirs and diaries, this book argues for a central role of all items of creativity in helping us to understand the true experience of life in captivity. The international authors draw upon a rich seam of material from their own case studies of POW and civilian internment camps across the world, to offer a range of interpretations of this diverse and extraordinary material.

In the opening decades of the twentieth century, Germany was at the cutting edge of arts and humanities scholarship across Europe. However, when many of its key thinkers - leaders in their fields in classics, philosophy, archaeology, art history, and oriental studies - were forced to flee to England following the rise of the Nazi regime, Germany's loss became Oxford's gain. From the mid-1930s onwards, Oxford could accurately be described as an 'ark of knowledge' of western civilization: a place where ideas about art, culture, and history could be rescued, developed, and disseminated freely. The city's history as a place of refuge for scientists who were victims of Nazi oppression is by now familiar, but the story of its role as a sanctuary for cultural heritage, though no less important, has received much less attention. In this volume, the impact of Oxford as a shelter, a meeting point, and a centre of thought in the arts and humanities specifically is addressed, by looking both at those who sought refuge there and stayed, and those whose lives intersected with Oxford at crucial moments before and during the war. Although not every great refugee can be discussed in detail in this volume, this study offers an introduction to the unique conjunction of place, people, and time that shaped Western intellectual history, exploring how the meeting of minds enabled by libraries, publishing houses, and the University allowed Oxford's refugee scholars to have a profound and lasting impact on the development of British culture. Drawing on oral histories, previously unpublished letters, and archives, it illuminates and interweaves both personal and global histories to demonstrate how, for a short period during the war, Oxford brought together some of the greatest minds of the age to become the custodians of a great European civilization.

The development of key methodologies for the study of battlefields in the USA in the 1980s inspired a generation of British and European archaeologists to turn their attention to sites in their own countries. The end of the Cold War and key anniversaries of the World Wars inspired others, especially in the UK, to examine the material legacy of those conflicts before they disappeared. By 2000 the study of war was again firmly on the archaeological agenda. The overall purpose of the book is to encourage proponents and practitioners of Conflict Archaeology to consider what it is for and how to develop it in the future.The central argument is that, at present , Conflict Archaeology is effectively divided into closed communities who do not interact to any large extent. These separate communities are divided by period and by nationality, so that a truly international Conflict Archaeology has yet to emerge. These divisions prevent the exchange of information and ideas across boundaries and thereby limit the scope of the field. This book discusses these issues in detail, clearly outlining how they affect the development of Conflict Archaeology as a coherent branch of archaeology.

Heritage, memory, community archaeology and the politics of the past form the main strands running through the papers in this volume.The authors tackle these subjects from a range of different philosophical perspectives, with many drawing on the experience of recent community, commercial and other projects. Throughout, there is a strong emphasis on both the philosophy of engagement and with its enactment in specific contexts; the essays deal with an interest in the meaning, value and contested nature of the recent past and in the theory and practice of archaeological engagements with that past.

This new edition of Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism shows where the study of capitalism leads archaeologists, scholars and activists. Essays cover a range of geographic, colonial and racist contexts around the Atlantic basin: Latin America and the Caribbean, North America, the North Atlantic, Europe and Africa. Here historical archaeologists use current capitalist theory to show the results of creating social classes, employing racism and beginning and expanding the global processes of resource exploitation. Scholars in this volume also do not avoid the present condition of people, discussing the lasting effects of capitalism’s methods, resistance to them, their archaeology and their point to us now. Chapters interpret capitalism in the past, the processes that make capitalist expansion possible, and the worldwide sale and reduction of people. Authors discuss how to record and interpret these. This book continues a global historical archaeology, one that is engaged with other disciplines, peoples and suppressed political and economic histories. Authors in this volume describe how new identities are created, reshaped and made to appear natural. Chapters in this second edition also continue to address why historical archaeologists study capitalism and the relevance of this work, expanding on one of the important contributions of historical archaeologies of capitalism: critical archaeology.

This book is an archaeological study of the cultures of conflict through an examination of caves and tunnels used during the Pacific War. Referred to here as “karst defenses,” WWII caves and tunnels can be found throughout the karst landscapes of the Pacific. Karst defenses have been hidden, literally by the jungle and figuratively by history, for over 70 years. Based on a study of karst defenses and their related artifacts and oral histories in Saipan, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, this book uses karst defenses to investigate the varied human experiences before, during and after the Pacific War. Historically, the book reveals new knowledge about the overall defense strategies used in the Pacific. Karst defenses were a central component of Pacific War defense and were constructed and used by civilians, the Japanese military and U.S. troops as early as 1942. Karst defenses also functioned as command posts, hospitals, shelters, storage units and combat positions. The book sheds light on the social aspects that influenced the construction and use of karst defenses, including the fragmented relationship between the Imperial Japanese Navy and the Imperial Japanese Army, the social status of civilians under Japanese rule and the clandestine plans of the U.S. in Micronesia. The book also discusses the complex contemporary meanings of this dark, shared heritage.

The archaeology of war has revealed evidence of bravery, sacrifice, heroism, cowardice, and atrocities. Mostly absent from these narratives of victory and defeat, however, are the experiences of prisoners of war, despite what these can teach us about cruelty, ingenuity, and human adaptability. The international array of case studies in Prisoners of War restores this hidden past through case studies of PoW camps of the Napoleonic era, the American Civil War, and both World Wars. These bring to light wide variations in historical and cultural details, excavation and investigative methods used, items found and their interpretation, and their contributions to archaeology, history and heritage. Illustrated with diagrams, period photographs, and historical quotations, these chapters vividly reveal challenges and opportunities for researchers and heritage managers, and revisit powerful ethical questions that persist to this day. Notorious and lesser-known aspects of PoW experiences that are addressed include: Designing and operating an 18th-century British PoW camp. Life and death at Confederate and Union American Civil War PoW camps. The role of possessions in coping strategies during World War I. The archaeology of the ‘Great Escape’ Experiencing and negotiating space at civilian internment camps in Germany and Allied PoW camps in Normandy in World War II. The role of archaeology in the memorial process, in America, Norway, Germany and France Graffiti, decorative ponds, illicit saké drinking, and family life at Japanese American camps As one of the first book-length examinations of this fascinating multidisciplinary topic, Prisoners of War merits serious attention from historians, social justice researchers and activists, archaeologists, and anthropologists.

Camps as a global and ubiquitous mass phenomenon of the present and a flexible isolation tool for/against specific socially, politically, or ethnically defined groups are at the centre of current policies and societal debates. In the present volume, the authors explore camps as (cultural) spaces in a broad sense and deal with their complex dimensions as sites of the Modern. They examine camp spaces and their social configurations, physical/architectural qualities, symbolic functions as well as cultural representations in an intent to define the inscribed ambivalences, inconsistencies and paradoxes of the phenomenon. Positioned within different disciplinary contexts (Contemporary History, Visual Studies, Architectural History, Refugee and Gender Studies), the assembled articles present a wide range of understandings and approaches to space, materiality and the relations between governance and agency. The contributors stress the entanglement of social structures, cultural discourse, institutionalisation, individual perception and appropriation. They show how the issue of camps can serve as cross-sectional matter for researchers in different fields in Cultural Theory and Contemporary History.