Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T09:33:51.216Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

An Archaeology of Remembering: Death, Bereavement and the First World War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2008

Sarah Tarlow
Sarah Tarlow
Affiliation:
Department of ArchaeologyUniversity of WalesLampeter Dyfed SA48 7ED
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Archaeological approaches to death and commemoration which privilege the negotiation of power relationships can underestimate the importance of personal and emotional responses to bereavement and mortality. Remembrance of the dead of the First World War is often understood in terms of the promotion of nationalist ideologies, but emotional factors such as grief and shock were also involved in the shaping of commemorative responses. In this article, responses to the First World War at national, local, and individual levels are considered. I suggest that people select monuments, places and ways of remembering for their power to express intense and personal feelings.

Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Archaeological Journal , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , April 1997 , pp. 105 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research 1997

References

Ariès, P., 1981 [1977]. The Hour of Our Death. Trans. Weaver, Helen. London: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Barclay, R., 1965. The Population of Orkney 1755–1961. Kirkwall: W.R. Macintosh.Google Scholar
Barrett, J., 1987. Contextual archaeology. Antiquity 61, 468–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barrett, J., 1988. The living, the dead and the ancestors: late Neolithic and early Bronze Age mortuary practices, in The Archaeology of Context in the Neolithic and Bronze Age: Recent Trends, eds. Barrett, J. & Kinnes, I.. Sheffield: Department of Archaeology and Prehistory, University of Sheffield, 30–41.Google Scholar
Barrett, J., 1994. Fragments from Antiquity. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Bauman, Z., 1992. Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Borkenau, F., 1965. The concept of death, in Death and Identity, ed. Fulton, R.. New York (NY): John Wiley & Sons, 42–55.Google Scholar
Cannadine, D., 1981. War and death, grief and mourning in modern Britain, in Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death, ed. Whaley, J.. London: Europa, 187–242.Google Scholar
Cannon, A., 1986. Socioeconomic Change and Material Culture Diversity: Nineteenth–century Drave Monuments in Rural Cambridgeshire. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge.Google Scholar
Cannon, A., 1989. The historical dimension in mortuary expressions of status and sentiment. Current Anthropology 30, 437–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carman, J., in press. Introduction, in Material Harm: Studies in the Archaeology of War and Violence, ed. Carman, J.. Glasgow: Cruithne Press.Google Scholar
Cecil, R., 1991. The Masks of Death: Changing Attitudes in the Nineteenth Century. Sussex: Book GuildGoogle Scholar
Curl, J., 1972. The Victorian Celebration of Death. Newton Abbot: David & Charles.Google Scholar
Curl, J., 1980. A Celebration of Death: an Introduction to Some of the Buildings, Monuments and Settings of Funerary Architecture in the Western European Tradition. London: Constable.Google Scholar
Davey Smith, G., Carroll, D., Rankin, S. & Rowan, D., 1992. Socioeconomic differentials in mortality: evidence from Glasgow graveyards. British Medical Journal 305, 1554–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davies, J., 1993. War memorials, in The Sociology of Death, ed. Clark, D.. Oxford: Blackwell, 112–28.Google Scholar
Fritz, J., 1978. Palaeopsychology today: ideational systems and human adaptation in prehistory, in Social Archaeology: Beyond Subsistence and Dating, eds. Redman, C., Berman, M., Curtin, E., Langhorne, W., Versaggi, N. & Wanser, J.. New York (NY) & London: Academic Press, 37–60.Google Scholar
Giddens, A., 1984. The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Gledhill, J., Bender, B. & Larsen, M. (eds.), 1988. State and Society: the Emergence and Development of Social Hierarchy and Political Centralisation. London: Unwin Hyman.Google Scholar
Gorer, G., 1965. Death, Grief and Mourning in Contemporary Britain. London: Cresset Press.Google Scholar
Gregory, A., 1993. Armistice Day 1919–1946. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge.Google Scholar
Harré, R. (ed.), 1986. The Social Construction of Emotions. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Heelas, P., 1986. Emotion talk across cultures, in Harré (ed.), 234–66.Google Scholar
Hodder, I., 1986. Reading the Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Imperial War Graves Commission, 1931. The War Graves of the British Empire: the Register of the Names of Those who Fell in the Great War and are Buried in Cemeteries and Churchyards in the Counties of Banff, Caithness, Moray, Nairn, Orkney, Ross and Cromarty, Sutherland and Zetland, Scotland. London: Imperial War Graves Commission.Google Scholar
Kristiansen, K., 1984. Ideology and material culture: an archaeological perspective, in Marxist Perspectives in Archaeology, ed. Spriggs, M.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 72–100.Google Scholar
Kus, S., 1992. Towards an archaeology of body and soul, in Representations in Archaeology, eds. Gardin, J.-C. & Peebles, C.. Bloomington (IN): Indiana University Press, 168–77.Google Scholar
Leventhal, H., 1980. Towards a comprehensive theory of emotion, in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 13, ed. Berkowitz, L.. London: Academic Press, 149–207.Google Scholar
Levy, R., 1984. Emotion, knowing and culture, in Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self and Emotion, eds. Shweder, R. & Levine, R.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 21–37.Google Scholar
McGuire, R., 1988. Dialogues with the dead: ideology and the cemetery, in The Recovery of Meaning: Historical Archaeology in the Eastern United States., eds. Leone, M. & Potter, P.. Washington (DC): Smithsonian Institution Press, 435–80.Google Scholar
McGuire, R. & Paynter, R., 1991. The Archaeology of Inequality. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Miller, D. & Tilley, C., 1984. Ideology, Power and Prehistory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, D., Rowlands, M. & Tilley, C., 1989. Domination and Resistance. London: Unwin Hyman.Google Scholar
Mitford, J., 1963. The American Way of Death. London: Hutchinson.Google Scholar
Mizoguchi, K., 1992. A historiography of a linear barrow cemetery: a structurationist's point of view. Archaeological Review from Cambridge, 11(1), 39–49.Google Scholar
Mizoguchi, K., 1993. Time in the reproduction of mortuary practices. World Archaeology 25(2) (Conceptions of time and ancient society), 223–35.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Morley, J., 1971. Death, Heaven and the Victorians London: Studio Vista.Google Scholar
Mosse, G., 1979. National cemeteries and national revival: the cult of the fallen soldiers in Germany. Journal of Contemporary History 14(1) (January 1979), 1–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mosse, G., 1990. Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Mytum, H., 1989. Public health and private sentiment: the development of cemetery architecture and funerary monuments from the eighteenth century onwards.World Archaeology 21(2), 283–97.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mytum, H., 1990. A study of Pembrokeshire graveyards: cultural variability in material and language. Bulletin of the C.B.A. Churches Committee 27 (1990), 6–11.Google Scholar
Owen, W., 1946 [1920]. The Poems of Wilfrid Owen London: Chatto &Windus.Google Scholar
Parker Pearson, M., 1982. Mortuary practices, society and ideology: an ethnoarchaeological study, in Symbolic and Structural Archaeology, ed. Hodder, I.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 99–114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pinch, A., 1995. Emotion and history: a review article. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 37(1), 100–109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Richardson, R., 1988. Death, Dissection and the Destitute London: Routledge &Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Rosaldo, R., 1986. Grief and a headhunter's rage: on the cultural force of emotions, in Text, Play and Story: the Construction and Reconstruction of Self and Society, ed. Bruner, E.. Washington (DC): American Ethnological Society, 178–95.Google Scholar
Rowlands, M., 1993. The role of memory in the transmission of culture. World Archaeology 25(2), 141–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shanks, M. & Tilley, C., 1987a. Social Theory and Archaeology. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Shanks, M. & Tilley, C., 1987b. Re-constructing Archaeology: Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Simpson, M., 1979. Dying, Death and Grief: a Critical Bibliography. New York (NY) & London: Plenum Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Simpson, M., 1987. Dying, Death and Grief: a Critical Bibliography. New edition. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.Google Scholar
Stone, L., 1977. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800. London: Weidenfeld &Nicholson.Google Scholar
Tarlow, S., 1995. Metaphors of Death in Orkney 1560–1945 AD. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge.Google Scholar
Thomas, J., 1991. Rethinking the Neolithic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Treherne, P., 1994. Technologies of the Body and Self: Personal ‘Toilet Articles‘ in the Nordic Early Bronze Age. Unpublished M.Phil, thesis, University of Cambridge.Google Scholar
Vernant, J.-P., 1991. A ‘beautiful death’ and the disfigured corpse in Homeric epic, in Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays, ed. Zeitlin, F.. Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press, 50–74.Google Scholar
Waugh, E., 1948. The Loved One. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Google Scholar
Whittick, A., 1946.War Memorials. London: Country Life.Google Scholar
Winter, J., 1977. Britain's ‘Lost Generation’ of the First World War. Population Studies 31, 449–66.Google ScholarPubMed
Winter, J., 1995. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: the Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Wurst, L., 1991. ‘Employees must be of moral and temperate habits’: rural and urban elite ideologies, in McGuire &Paynter (eds.), 125–49.Google Scholar