The Role of the Archaeologist as a Social Justice Agent
A few weeks ago, while attending the Protohistoric Archaeology course within the Archaeology degree at the University of Barcelona, one of the professors posed from his perspective how the profession of historian is the second most important profession for society after health professions. This led me to think about how this also applies to Archaeology, given that an archaeologist in a certain way acts as a social justice agent.
Violence in LBK
When talking about the role of the archaeologist as a social justice agent, many associate it with periods like the Spanish Civil War, but in reality, it goes much further. We must go back to the Neolithic period, more specifically to the European Ceramic Neolithic, with the ceramic culture LBK (Linearbandkeramik, or "Ceramic of lines and bands"), dating from 5500-4500 BCE between the sixth and fifth millennia BCE covering central Europe. This Neolithic culture stands out among other things for its sadistic and violent funerary world.
With the arrival of LBK, a new type of domestic structure appears that we call in Archaeology "long house". They are long rectangular houses and usually found isolated, each one being an autonomous farm with a large family unit (Meyer et al., 2014).
On the one hand, we see how this culture buries its dead in necropolises, which gives us individual graves in lateral position. Where additionally not everyone has access to grave goods. But now it is extremely important to talk about the collective burials of this culture. Does this tell us something about violence?
During LBK there is a notable increase in collective graves, we have examples of this with the Schletz-Asparn (Austria) grave, Talheim (Germany), Halberstadt (Saxony), Schöneck-Kilianstädten (Germany), Herxheim (Germany) and countless more collective graves found. But what is interesting about all this is the clear extreme violence present in these bodies, where entire villages are massacred by another village. Men, women, and children killed with skull fractures of a hammer type, with peri-mortem rib fractures and projectile impacts. Some bodies even show various amputations. What could explain this extreme violence?
The case of Talheim (Germany) exemplifies this, where there are 34 individuals (men, women, and children), unlike other common LBK graves here women in fertile age were killed, indicating that the rival village did not kidnap young women as happened in Schletz-Asparn (Austria). Some bodies present arrows embedded and numerous impact fractures. The analyses showed that these are 34 people from a single lineage/family. (Meyer et al., 2015)
The role of the archaeologist is key in these investigations, because more than simply drawing interpretations of what may have happened, we want to know the identity of those people whom we now find ourselves excavating, who they were, their story and why they ended up having such a tragic end. We want to know the personal history of each individual in the grave, their ages, their type of diet, if they suffered any disease, if they had pathologies and therefore knowing what activity each one performed within the farm. And in a certain way, without the archaeologist realizing it, is doing social justice. For there is no greater act of social justice than wanting to know who those people were and studying them.
The Common Grave at Lützen
If we move forward in history, placing ourselves in the context of the Thirty Years' War, more specifically in the Battle of Lützen, we have another very interesting and perhaps even unique case in Modern Age Archaeology.
On November 16, 1632, the Swedish army commanded by King Gustav II Adolf encountered Wallenstein's army at Lützen. The two armies met at Lützen participating in what was one of the most famous battles of the Thirty Years' War because it was one of the longest and most tragic, where the Swedish king also died (Wilson et al., 2018).
In the year 2011, German archaeologists discovered what is now known as the Common Grave at Lützen, where 48 male individuals were found, all of them with a great variety of wounds.
At first it was not certain about the dating. Therefore, the dating of the grave was based on its geographical location. Finally, radiocarbon dating confirmed these previous conclusions and associated it with the 1632 battlefield. Additionally, age and sex were clear indicators that this was a common grave resulting from conflict, as all were men of an appropriate age to participate in one (Nicklisch et al., 2017).
The skeletons presented many traumatic injuries, and the most impressive thing about it is that there was no skeleton without any injury, they all were affected by something.
Trauma from blunt force was very present in this common grave. But why are traumatic injuries important? Cranial trauma is often recurrent in conflicts because interpersonal violence usually targets the head as it is like the "identity" of the victim (Sutherland et al., 2005). Therefore, both in this grave and other historical conflicts, we see that the place of attack is usually the enemy's head. If you take away the identity from the victim, you take everything away. And thus archaeologists are tasked with recovering, knowing, and reconstructing the identity of the deceased person before us, once again acting as a social justice agent.
Up until now we have not talked about funerary grave goods. Well, between the feet of one of the individuals, a coin minted in 1623 was found. This was very important for dating the common grave with even more precision.
To this day, the debate about whether the common grave at Lützen should continue to be exposed in the State Museum of Halle or not is still ongoing, as for some it represents a lack of respect for the victims of the grave and they are after all corpses. In this sense, archaeology of mass graves goes beyond academic circles; it serves as a bridge between the past and current values regarding human rights, once again social justice.
Conclusions
Bringing this to contemporary conflict archaeology such as the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) along with Neolithic LBK mass graves or the Lützen grave evidences how an archaeologist's work goes beyond recovering remains: it involves restoring identities and generating knowledge. Archaeology reveals how violence leaves deep marks.
By excavating graves, the discipline transforms into a vehicle of truth. Thus, archaeology consolidates as a fundamental tool for addressing the voids of oblivion, reminding us of the socially responsible role that the discipline is called to fulfill.
Bibliography
Meyer, C., Lohr, C., Gronenborn, D. & Alt, K.W. (2015) ‘The massacre mass grave of Schöneck-Kilianstädten reveals new insights into collective violence in Early Neolithic Central Europe’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(36), pp. 11217–11222. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1504365112
Meyer, J., Lohr, J., Kurbis, O., Dresely, V., Haak, W., Adler, J.J., Gronenborn, D. & Alt, K.W. (2014) ‘Mass graves of the LBK’, in Whittle, A. & Bickle, P. (eds.) Early Farmers: The View from Archaeology and Science. Oxford: Oxbow Books, pp. 307-326.
Nicklisch, N., Ramsthaler, F., Meller, H., Friederich, S. & Alt, K.W. (2017) ‘The face of war: Trauma analysis of a mass grave from the Battle of Lützen (1632)’, PLOS ONE, 12(5), e0178252. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0178252
Sutherland, T. & Holst, M. (2005) Battlefield archaeology: A guide to the archaeology of conflict (BAJR Guide 8). Available at: http://www.bajr.org/BAJRREAD/BAJRGUIDES.asp
Wilson, P.H. (2018) Lützen: Great Battles (2nd ed.). Oxford: OU
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