The period since the Second World War has seen a sustained increase in the use of archaeological and forensic techniques to investigate the material traces of both historic and recent episodes of mass violence (Rosenblatt 2015; Moon 2014; Ferllini 2003). The exhumation of mass graves can enable the identification and eventual return of the dead to their families or communities for reburial and commemoration. Furthermore, the detailed reconstruction of the events surrounding death and burial can support the prosecution of perpetrators, or other forms of transitional justice, such as truth and reconciliation hearings. The physical evidence obtained from mass burials can also inform future historical accounts and counteract revisionism or denial (Saunders 2002). Focusing on the mass grave as a spatial feature, and the wider notion of the forensic landscape, this chapter will highlight some of the ambivalent properties of mass grave sites as places of horror, abjection, pollution, absence, and haunting, but also, conversely, as potential indices for ancestral bonds, collective sacrifice, and shared suffering, and a connection to the land. The highly charged psycho-geography of missing and concealed bodies in the landscape, which remain out of place and unshriven by normative burial rites, exert a powerful hold on the individual and collective imagination. This chapter will also look at the affordances of the forensic process itself, how a forensic investigation radically reframes a site of mass violence, changing the narrative that surrounds it, and the reconstituting of the grave as a site of scientific enquiry (Renshaw 2017a).
This chapter underscores the importance of situating the mass grave in its landscape, both forensically to understand the scale and complexity of a crime, and culturally to understand how a mass grave is conceptualised within a network of sites with interdependent mnemonic and historical meanings. Aspects of the forensic process, reconstructing the particularities of each individual death, and uniquely identifying each body, whilst vital to the investigative goals, can risk de-historicising a grave or untethering it from its wider cultural and symbolic context. The evolution of forensic archaeology as a discipline, stressing objectivity, impartiality, and an ultra-empirical paradigm have arguably compounded this untethering of the mass grave from its multi-layered cultural and historical associations, engendering a ‘radical distance,’ as Domanska (2005) describes it (see Crossland 2009, 2013 for a deeper discussion of the development of this evidentiary paradigm and its implications). In defining itself as a new field with the authority to speak in a juridical setting, and produce evidence that passes stringent legal standards, forensic archaeology has arguably divorced itself from more socially informed, theoretically engaged, and reflective areas of archaeological work (Steele 2008). The reinsertion of the mass grave into its wider cultural landscape is effectively an argument for a mutual engagement between forensic archaeology and the approaches of funerary archaeology, conflict archaeology, and landscape archaeology in their broadest manifestations (Renshaw 2013).
This contribution will draw on a number of geographical and historical contexts. Illustrative examples are taken from my own participation in exhumations in a number of settings, particularly my participant-observation conducted in the excavation of Republican civilian mass graves from the Spanish Civil War, as well as extensive ethnographic interviews conducted with both the investigative teams and the relatives of the dead in rural communities in Spain (Renshaw 2011). It will also draw on ethnographic work conducted in Australia and Northern France with relatives of Anzac soldiers recovered from a Second World War mass grave on the Western Front (Renshaw 2017b). In addition to this, some of the considerable body of literature concerning the wars in former Yugoslavia (Wagner 2008) will be drawn upon as a key example of the enduring power and significance of mass graves in the landscape.
The dead in mass graves resulting from conflict or violence can be characterised as bodies out of place. The fact that they lie in a mass grave means, by definition, that these are individuals who have not gone through the normal rites of passage that follow death. They are often not fully accounted for by state bureaucracies, and the deaths have not been subjected to medical, scientific, or legal scrutiny. They have not been the subject of normative burial rituals, nor received the common kinds of collective commemoration by their family and community. Although many will be missed and mourned by loved ones for years, without a body or burial site as a focal point, this may be a very private and atomised form of grief. This means the biographies of the dead, and particularly the circumstances of their deaths, are often shrouded in uncertainty. Accounts of these deaths may be repressed in both public and private if they are politically dangerous or psychologically painful. This may result in silence surrounding the dead in mass graves, or, conversely, the absence of certainty is filled by multiple competing and unstable narratives.
Opening up a mass grave for exhumation creates a new space in which representations of the past are created and contested. The open grave as a representational space functions on multiple levels. On a fundamental level, opening the grave demarcates a new physical space, a new geographical location which is a focal point and destination for those seeking both the remains of the dead and evidence of the past. This seems like a simplistic observation, but the creation of a destination, and, above all, a public space, can be central to the impact of an exhumation in those societies where the past has been strongly repressed. A strong illustration of this is the exhumation of Republican civilian victims of the Spanish Civil War, which has grown into a popular social movement since the inception of these investigations in 2000. The repressive dictatorship that followed this conflict achieved such a profound domination of public space and over the collective commemorations of the war that it was politically and socially unthinkable to publicly mourn the Republican dead (Bevernage & Colaert 2014). In the post-war period, many communities had a surveillance culture so strong that it even inhibited the memorialisation of the dead within the home and family. In small communities that experienced traumatic levels of violence during the war, the practices of self-censorship were deeply entrenched and conditioned in representations of the past in all public spaces, such as the street, village square, town hall, church, school, or bar. The creation of a brand new public space cuts through these entrenched prohibitions. This is a manifestation of Weizman’s usage of the term ‘forensis’ as a form of ‘public truth’ (2014), tracing the etymology of the word ‘forensic,’ to its roots in the forum of the ancient world. For those who have experienced the kind of grassroots, community-led exhumations that occur in Spain, the image of a classical forum is very resonant. Relatives of the dead and community members of all ages visit the grave to share testimony and anecdotes, to observe the progress of the archaeological work, to offer commentary, manual labour, equipment, and food. These are dynamic social spaces where the mood and focus can shift rapidly, from scientific analysis, to mourning, to humour. As a participant-observer, it was clear that the unstructured space was extremely helpful in breaking down prohibitions, with some survivors or descendants visiting multiple times before gaining the confidence to give testimony or engage with the investigation (Renshaw 2011).
The more conventional image of the forensic mass grave exhumation, with highly controlled access to the site, and expert practitioners in protective clothing, using specialist equipment, can also create new representational spaces. The paraphernalia of the forensic process dress the site and create a new category of space, namely, the crime scene. This produces an accompanying category shift in the events that took place there. They are no longer simply events of the traumatic past, but deaths and burials that have finally arrived at the point of recognition that warrant expert investigation, collective attention, and resourcing. Paradoxically, even as the exhumation process exposes human remains and buried objects in all their horror or pathos, it also reframes the sites by situating it in the redemptive narratives of scientific investigation and historic justice (Renshaw 2017a). The exhumation process has many benign associations, as a rational, sense-making activity, with the potential to bring order to the chaos of violent death and a jumble of bodies in a grave. If the grave and the dead inside it have been the subject of denial or forgetting, this is dramatically reversed by the intense scrutiny inherent in the forensic process, and changes the status of the dead profoundly, even before they have been excavated and analysed. The evidence gathered from exhumed bodies and objects engenders new representations about the past in terms of scientific reports, or legal hearings, which in time may inform academic or historiographical understandings of these events. But running in tandem to these kinds of empirical findings is the production and circulation of a wealth of stories and images in news coverage and online sources. As a rich source of striking visual images, human stories, and metaphors about the past, mass grave exhumations often elicit a huge creative response by artists, writers, filmmakers, and photographers (Ferrándiz 2006). Where access is allowed, the graves themselves can become a magnet for these kinds of representational activities. These images and stories, spread via the media and the arts, can have a much more profound impact on the collective or popular understanding of the traumatic past than a scientific or legal report.
The search for mass graves, crime scenes, and missing persons all engender a particular way of understanding and evaluating the landscape. This means seeking out the potential for risk, wrongdoing, and concealment in an environment, and anticipating how both victim and perpetrator might behave within it. Forms of spatial analysis have long been used in police investigations (Rossmo 2000; Canter 2003), and the accrued knowledge of trends and patterns in human spatial behaviour regularly inform the search for both missing persons and clandestine burials (Killam 2004). Congram et al. (2017) assert the necessity of more sophisticated spatial thinking, more refined and systematic spatial recording, and the use of GIS in post-war investigations. They cite an example of how seemingly benign places in the landscape can inform the search for mass graves, referring to a map presented in evidence against the Bosnian Serb former General Ratko Mladic. It was demonstrated that during the Yugoslav wars, school buildings were repurposed as detention centres and furthermore, that the location of these schools had a predictable proximity to the mass execution sites where detainees were killed. Congram et al. advocate the use of software to generate layers of data such as soil type, gradient, and proximity to roads to map the probability of a potential grave location. Temporally specific data relating to the unfolding conflict can also be inserted into the map to visualize the situation on the ground, including the last reported sightings of victims, military control of territory, and the destruction of access routes such as roads and bridges. The ability to combine data sources, and assign a weighting of significance to the different factors that determine the location of a mass grave, makes this a powerful tool in locating burials and execution sites.
The necessity of this kind of spatial data becomes apparent when considering how mass killings and burials can be crimes of such scale and complexity that they spread to occupy great swathes of the landscape, and ultimately come to define that landscape. As Cyr phrases it, ‘crimes of scale have a way of invoking landscapes’ (2014: 90). The forensic landscape resulting from the Srebrenica massacre exemplifies this phenomenon, comprising of a web of interconnected crime scenes (Jugo & Wagner 2017). These range in nature from holding centres, to execution sites, to the escape routes and hiding places of the survivors, which were also places of great hardship and trauma. Aside from the horrifying scale and brutality, a distinctive feature of the Srebrenica massacre was the post-mortem movement of bodies from primary, secondary, and even tertiary burials as the perpetrators attempted to disperse the evidence of mass killings and confound future investigations. The detailed analysis of environmental evidence relating to the Srebrenica massacre conducted by Brown (2006) gives some insight into the macabre churn of these graves.
The evidence from pollen, soil, and sediment was used to map a series of links between grave sites and reconstruct the post-mortem movement of human remains through the landscape. Brown describes his analysis of seven primary mass graves and a further 19 secondary sites. The difference in underlying geology, and variable plant cover such as meadow, arable, woodland, and orchard, allowed a distinctive signature for each. The dead bodies transferred trace evidence from the execution sites into the primary graves, and then further traces were transferred between primary and secondary graves. The movement of decomposing bodies, often using heavy mechanised diggers, caused dismemberment and the disassociation of body parts, clothing, and possessions. This meant that family groups and even the parts of a single individual could be scattered through the landscape, perpetrating a further outrage on the dead and further obstructing their recovery and identification. The effort expended in the dispersal of the dead speaks of the planning, resourcing, and knowing culpability of the perpetrators. In her ethnographic work conducted in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia,Petrović-Šteger (2009) captures the emotional impact of the shattered and scattered bodies of the Yugoslav wars experienced across all communities, exploring the dilemmas faced by those who receive partial human remains but know that the rest of their loved one is still out in the landscape.
The agony of these processes, as disparate sources of evidence combine into an assemblage that proves beyond doubt that a relative is dead, is also described powerfully by Wagner (2008) and Stover and Peress (1998). Cyr writes movingly of the affective resonance of this landscape, knowing that so many thousands could disappear into it. In a haunting phrase, she describes these missing men as ‘becoming landscape’ in that they were swallowed up by the earth and concealed within it. In the absence of human remains, the landscape becomes an index for the missing. Cyr describes how these places have been altered forever by ‘the precarious but nevertheless enduring experience of looking to landscape for missing men,’ or as one of the thousands of bereaved women of Srebrenica expressed it, ‘we turn to our empty forests’ (2014: 89). The landscape exerts a malign power because it will not relinquish these bodies to their families, but is simultaneously a site of memory and commemoration, sanctified by the presence of so many dead.
The preceding section emphasises the mass grave as a focal point and as a bounded site in the landscape that can become emblematic of a complex sequence of events. The highly elaborated nature of the archaeological and scientific work carried out at the grave reinforces this focus, as does the extreme emotional and visual power of exposed bodies and objects. However, the risk of this bounded view is that the grave site becomes untethered from its wider spatial context, and stripped out from the temporal sequence that led to its formation. An exclusive focus on the mass grave can preclude an analysis of the way the grave is really understood and experienced by witnesses, survivors, descendants, and surrounding communities. The predominance of the grave, as emblematic of the traumatic past, can also create an implicit hierarchy of loss or suffering which overshadows a whole suite of experiences during war, including displacement, destitution, imprisonment, forced labour, battle trauma, and gendered or sexual violence, all of which may be associated with other locales in the wider warscape (González-Ruibal 2016). An investigative paradigm that focuses on the mass grave, to the exclusion of other potential sites of memory, risks missing a close attention to vernacular memorial practices and the affective or symbolic significance of other sites, which may pre- or post-date the exhumation process. The meaning of a mass grave can change when it is brought into tension with these other locales. Vernacular or emic memorial practices can reveal the importance of these associations and highlight the wider context of the grave.
It is readily apparent that the Western Front represents a warscape, both in the large-scale monument building and concerted memorialisation of the dead, and more subtly in the way settlements and natural landscapes were transformed by processes of destruction and renewal in the war and its aftermath, and the physical traces of these forces can be discerned everywhere. The interconnected nature of the sites is reinforced by the form of modern pilgrimage that has emerged, in stages, over the last century (Beaumont 2015). The visitor reinforces the relationships between these sites by moving bodily between them. Initiatives to mark the centenary of the First World War include the regeneration of sites and their repackaging as the ‘Australian Remembrance Trail’ (Sumartojo 2014). Various stretches of the trail can be followed depending on the time, resources, and interests of the visitor. Lesser-known sites have explicitly had their status raised by forging a connection with the most popular and heavily visited locales. Visitors can move through the landscape to experience an unfolding narrative, mirroring the historical sequence of events. This is an intensive and immersive period of engagement with the past, and with the dead. Each site visited informs the experience and understanding of the next.
In this kind of transnational commemoration typified by the Western Front, there is clearly an impetus to experience multiple sites and maximise one’s affective and sensory engagement with the landscape. For many Australian, Canadian, or even British and German visitors, the trip may be characterised as a once-in-a-lifetime experience. The warscape is consumed to a saturation point, the work expended in moving through the landscape reaffirms familial or national bonds with the dead, memories and mementoes are taken home to share with others who cannot make the trip, and once home, the impressions gathered in these sites of memory furnish further personal acts of memorialisation of the dead. The commemorative activities on the Western Front, at Gallipoli, or on the Normandy beaches represents a very conscious and concerted engagement with a warscape, sometimes making a pilgrimage of many thousands of miles to be there. On the other end of the spectrum are the clandestine graves of Spain’s Civil War. These mass graves are spread throughout small communities in Spain, where many witnesses, survivors, and descendants live in intimate familiarity with the landscape in which past horrors have occurred. They navigate their warscape on a daily basis and negotiate the memories and emotions elicited by these places in order to be reconciled to the continuation of normal life.
It is worth reflecting in detail about the other sites that constitute the landscape of a Civil War and the sites that have a locally meaningful connection to the mass graves of the war dead (González-Ruibal 2016), as these may in fact be more significant as sites of memory than a grave site, which may not always be apparent on first sight. These places may be modest or mundane sites, because of the nature of the conflict (with victim and perpetrator often known to each other), with highly localised forms of violence running alongside national events, which are understood and remembered through the lens of tensions and grievances particular to each community. Taking the example of my fieldwork in two small villages in Burgos Province, Castile and Leon, the sites that came up in ethnographic interviews about the war were highly varied. Sites of political and class conflict that predated the war came up, as did local and regional sites of political authority and repression, such as the local police cells, or the central prison in Burgos where prisoners were concentrated prior to being handed back to militias and death squads for extrajudicial executions. In both villages, the church at the heart of the village and a nearby monastic complex were also cited as centres of authority, surveillance, and where decisions were made to blacklist Republican civilians. After the mass killings that occurred in these communities, both the empty homes of the dead, some of which fell into ruins, and the homes of the perpetrators, suspected of carrying out the murders, became psychically charged places for the relatives of the dead. Private property such as businesses, farmland, gardens, and homes changed hands during the war, frequently appropriated by the Francoist authorities, or more directly taken by the killers, and therefore function as enduring reminders of injustice.
Many shared public spaces in these small villages have vastly different meanings and associations, depending on one’s experience of the Civil War. For the defeated, the public monuments to Franco or other Nationalist military leaders, the post-war decision to change key street names to honour Franco’s victory, and the monument to those villagers who died fighting for Franco, ‘fallen for God and for Spain,’ reinforced the experience of defeat on a daily basis. Other, seemingly neutral, spaces could be associated with highly traumatic events. For example, in both these Burgos villages, survivors and descendants of Republican families gave accounts of extreme gendered and sexual violence that occurred in the main village square and throughout the streets, with its public and ritualised nature a key strategy in the humiliation of Republican women. The village cemetery was also a very charged space, especially for the spouses and mothers of the dead, as it came to signify the absence of the loved ones’ bodies and the impossibility of burying them and mourning them in the socially prescribed place (Renshaw 2011).
The example of the mass grave at Pheasant Wood, Fromelles, is very useful to consider, particularly as it reveals how this context changes through time, and different locales in the warscape are foregrounded in different periods. In the case of Fromelles, there are a number of significant locations in close proximity that constitute a dense memorial landscape. As the site of a brief but horrific First World War battle, with an Australian casualty rate unsurpassed in any other conflict, visitors and relatives of the dead had long engaged with this cluster of sites (Lindsay 2008). With the realisation that not all the dead from this battle had been recovered and reburied after the war, and the subsequent discovery of mass graves nearby (Loe 2010), the character of Fromelles as a memorial site has changed dramatically, but many of the key sites remain the same. Relatives of the dead and visitors to Fromelles highlight the importance of the village itself, which has diligently honoured the memory of the battle, and the sacrifice of the Anzac forces there. Some visitors highlight the original cemetery constructed for the Anzac dead from this battle, known as V.C. Corner and the ‘Cobber’s’ statue nearby which has become an icon of a particularly Australian martial heritage. Other visitors emphasise the collection of materiel and personal possessions collected over decades from the battle sites and the environs of the grave which give a very tangible and intimate insight into the dead soldiers. For some, the most significant part of visiting Fromelles is the phenomenological experience of the battle terrain itself, retracing the lines of trenches, and understanding the topography of the opposing positions.
These features are all in immediate proximity to the both the Commonwealth War Grave Commission (CWGC) Cemetery and the mass grave site that resulted from the battle (Summers 2010). Visitors’ affective responses and understanding of the grave are strongly informed by their experiences of these other locales, and the immersive layering of different indices for the battle, and for the dead. However, a wider memorial landscape can operate on multiple scales, and, in the case of the Fromelles, the sites of memory that interconnect around the dead are truly transnational. A considerable proportion of the vernacular memorial practices and invented traditions that have grown up around the Fromelles dead are explicitly focused on connecting the graves back to Australia and reasserting the bonds between the dead soldier’s origin and his final resting place (Scates 2016). In the ethnographic interviews I conducted, a broad range of objects and images were used to achieve a form of recursive binding between Fromelles and home in Australia, an assertion of affective and symbolic connections that transcended the obvious temporal and spatial distances (Renshaw 2017a; Scates 2016; and see Pinney 1997, 2005, for an exploration of temporality and the recursive). These included bringing offerings or deposits to the graves such as rocks, soil, and leaves taken from the informant’s own home; from favourite places; from local war memorials; from the graves of other relatives; and from the house in which the dead soldier had been born and raised, even if that house was now empty or in ruins. Other practices clearly intended to bridge these distances included bringing photographs to Fromelles – of the family home and photographs of the graves of now long deceased relatives, particularly the parents or children of the dead soldier – bringing together these important locales in family history in a virtual form.
Mass graves, like any type of human burial, are intimately connected with ancestors, and the physical emplacement of those ancestors is one of the ways contemporary societies trace their historical connection to a landscape. These ancestral associations may, in fact, be intensified in the case of mass graves. If the graves result from violent deaths, they become indices of sacrifice and blood that has been shed in a particular location, strengthening the psychic and moral investment in a particular locale. If the graves relate to a conflict over territory, attempted ethnic cleansing, genocide, or forced displacement, they serve as shorthand for this attack against the connection between people and place. Following displacement from ancestral land, the buried bodies of the dead may often be the most enduring tangible link between a cultural group and their erstwhile home, even after other forms of cultural heritage have been erased and living populations have been forced to leave. In this way, the dead can act as a placeholder, staking a claim for the historical presence of a particular group and can also exacerbate the pain of exile, as living communities are no longer in proximity to their dead and not able to recover or care for the remains. Sant Cassia’s (2007) ethnography of the divided communities of Cyprus powerfully illustrates the obstacles to mourning engendered by forced displacement. Even though they are in close geographical proximity, many of the war dead of the 1974 conflict are missing on the other side of the political divide, and, for decades, the families of the deceased could not undertake the search and recovery of these remains, except by clandestine means.
There are many examples of the connection between mass graves, missing bodies, and contested historical claim to territory, with the conflicts in former Yugoslavia being a paradigmatic case (Denich 1994). Verdery’s analysis of the complexity of dead body politics in the region notes that, even prior to political instability, there was an intense funerary culture and ‘burial regime’ which made the dead a likely source of symbolic capital for Nationalist movements. ‘People hold strong ideas about proper burial and about continuing relations with dead kin; frequent visits to tombs are common; and violence against enemy graves has a history at least as old as World War II’ (1999: 97). Bax also analysed the role of historic graves in resurgent Balkan nationalism and competing territorial claims: ‘in the Bosnian countryside the deceased continue to be part of a kinship group. Via them, their progeny can lay claim to the use of land and water and to the produce of fruit and olive trees’ (1997: 17). Bax reports hearing the oft-voiced suspicion in divided communities that bodies were being secretly removed from cemeteries, a type of ethnic cleansing of the dead which they referred to as killing the dead again.
The historic mass graves that become pivotal to the breakdown of Yugoslavia in the 1990s contained the dead resulting from the extreme violence of the Second World War in which competing ideological and ethnic groups committed countless atrocities. ‘Mass slaughter occurred on all sides, the victims being thrown into caves or buried in shallow mass graves or simply left to rot’ (Verdery 1999: 99). A contemporary commentator noted how the great swathes of unstable and heaving graves made it appear that ‘the very earth seemed to breathe’ (ibid., 99). The Yugoslav communist regime managed to obscure the details of much of these killings within a narrative of national struggle, but from the 1980s onward moves were made on a community level to locate and recover these bodies dating from the Second World War massacres. In 1991, a series of mass exhumations and reburials of Serbian victims of Croatian Ustaše militias were the focus of intensive media coverage and public participation. ‘Retrieving and reburying these nameless bones marked the territory claimed for Greater Serbia… . We might say that these corpses assisted in reconfiguring space by etching new international borders into it with their newly dug graves’ (Verdery 1999: 102). The movement of dead bodies prefigured the movement of troops, leading some commentators to describe them as a ‘vanguard of bones.’ Skinner et al. (2002) remark on how this preoccupation with ancestry, kinship, and human remains persisted even during conflict and societal breakdown, with a large volume of ‘body trading’ reportedly occurring between opposing forces, and even the planned exhumation and relocation of ancestral graves, as families and communities permanently relocated due to violence and the redrawing of national borders. This demonstrates how even whilst being sites of abjection, mass graves can be inextricably bound up with narratives of group identity, collective sacrifice, territorial possession, and inheritance, with bones functioning both as physical place markers in the ground, and as indices of the blood that has been shed into, and for, the homeland.
Forensic exhumation, like all archaeological excavation, destroys a feature at the same time it brings it into being as a site of enquiry and locus of evidence. Throughout this chapter, there are repeated examples of the overwhelming human impetus to find the dead, gather them in, analyse, commemorate, and grieve for them. However, the psychic power of mass grave sites is strong. The associations between the grave site, the memory of conflict, and the memory of the dead are multi-layered and can exert a strong pull even after the grave has been emptied. In my own ethnographic work concerning graves in rural Spain and Fromelles in Northern France, before the exhumations occurred, the mass graves were predominantly characterised as sites of abjection, signifiers of insult and injury to the dead. But after exhumation, with the bodies formally reburied, the grave site changed. It retained much of its psychic hold, but in a more benign form. Informants in rural Spain talked about the solidarity of the dead lying together, that they had ‘sanctified’ the soil with their bones (Renshaw 2011), and that the empty grave held more memories than the village cemetery, as a place to go and think about the dead, (Renshaw 2010). Although not expressed in these same explicit terms, the relatives of the Fromelles dead repeatedly expressed a desire for strands of continuity between the old mass grave and the newly built CWGC cemetery. The majority commented positively on the close proximity, even inter-visibility, of the old and new graves, with the same community, ambience, and familiar sounds surrounding the dead. All approved of the decision to order the graves in the new cemetery in the same sequence as the bodies had lain in the mass grave, and also strongly approved the decision to preserve the empty grave site in perpetuity, and not to farm or build on it. Several commented that the now empty mass grave was ‘a kind of monument.’ This illustrates that mass graves are inherently ambiguous and unstable sites, and that forensic intervention radically alters not only the physical site itself but the narrative surrounding it, both in its affect and meaning. To more fully understand the significance of a grave site, and therefore the impact of exhuming it, the grave must be brought into dialogue with a network of significant sites that make up the wider warscape or memorial landscape.
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