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.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. An Introduction to Archaeologies of Internment by Gabriel Moshenska and Adrian Myers

Chapter 2. Exceptional Space: Concentration Camps and Labor Compounds in Late 19th Century South Africa by Lindsay Weiss

Chapter 3. A Tale of Two Treatments: The Materiality of Internment on the Isle of Man in the World Wars by Harold Mytum

Chapter 4. The Archaeology of Internment in Francoist Spain (1936-1952) by Alfredo González-Ruibal

Chapter 5. The Things of Auschwitz by Adrian Myers

Chapter 6. Gordon Hirabayashi, the Tucsonians and the U.S. Constitution: Negotiating Reconciliation in a Landscape of Exile by Mary Farrell and Jeff Burton

Chapter 7. Control or Repression: Contrasting a Prisoner of War Camp and a Work Camp from World War Two by Iain Banks

Chapter 8. Engraving and Embroidering: The Material Culture of Internment by Gillian Carr

Chapter 9. Archaeological Investigations of WWII Internment Camps at Fort Hood, Texas by Judith Thomas

Chapter 10. Forgotten in the Wilderness: WWII German POW Camps in Finnish Lapland by Oula Seitsonen and Vesa-Pekka Herva

Chaper 11. Materialities and Traumatic Memories of a 20th Century Greek Exile Island by Nota Pantzou

Chapter 12. The Engineering of Genocide: An Archaeology of Dictatorship in Argentina by Andrés Zarankin and Melisa Salerno

Chapter 13. A Political Archaeology of Latin America’s Recent Past by Gonzalo Compañy, Gabriela González, Leonardo Ovando and David Rossetto

Chapter 14. Hohenschönhausen: Visual and Material Representations of a Cold War Prison Landscape by John Schofield and Wayne Cocroft

Chapter 15. The Last Murals of Long Kesh: Fragments of Political Imprisonment at the Maze Prison, Northern Ireland by Louise Purbrick

Chapter 16. Epilogue: Lockdown: On the Materiality of Confinement by Eleanor Conlin Casella