The public will not allow us to deal exclusively with things that are facile, amusing, curious, bizarre, passé, things that present no danger, because they concern societies which are either extinct or remote from our own. The public wants studies with conclusions relevant for the present [. . .] let us not be weary of bringing [scientific] facts into the debate. And if our practical conclusions will turn out to be meagre and hardly topical? All the more reason for us to propagate them liberally and energetically. (Marcel Mauss 1927, cited in Schlanger 2006: 15)

Tilted for us to see them straight on, 45 human skeletons were stacked in tight rows, with two more, arms out-stretched, on top of them (Figure 1). Below lay artillery and musket shot set out with equal neatness. Owing, perhaps, to such clinical arrangement, or to the unfamiliar angle, or perhaps to the sturdy frame marked ‘lützen, 6. november 1632’, or else to the gallery's classical formality, the full horror only registered later, after seeing many more bones, much finely crafted weaponry and armour, and pictures and plans of fights both modern and ancient. It was the first display in Krieg: eine archäologische Spurensuche (‘War: an archaeological search for traces’), an exhibition at the Prehistory Museum in Halle shown from November 2015 to May 2016.

It is understandable, perhaps inevitable, that archaeologists should be attracted to ideas of memory and of the ‘past in the past’. But other disciplines—anthropology, history, philosophy, sociology and beyond—also demonstrate a similar fascination. This wider attention has been diagnosed as symptomatic of late modernity. If so, what is the relevance and utility of memory for studies of the pre-modern past? In this NBC, we consider books that directly or indirectly explore this theme.