“There is an urgent need to conduct archeology of World War II sites”

Archaeologist Vincent Carpentier of the National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research recently published For World War II archaeology (La Découverte, 368 pages, €24). An important synthesis of research on the material legacy of the Second World War, this book also raises questions of related memory.

Why extend the field of study of archeology to such a recent period and such an event as the Second World War? Can archeology provide new information?

We are here at the center of a debate about the articulation between history and archaeology. The same question arose in the case of the Middle Ages – I’m a medievalist by training – and it was the subject of a fairly lively, even fierce, debate, pitting archaeologists against certain historians. From written sources such as charters, a theory was developed about the formation of rural communities. But archeology has shown that the history of these villages was much older and more complex than the texts say. Written sources do not objectively reveal all reality. Hence the interest in matching them with the material sources that archaeologists uncover. This also applies to periods of conflict, such as the Second World War, where written sources are far from telling everything, either for ideological or propaganda reasons, or because they are lost, as many archives of the III century.^e The Reich was destroyed. Material elements enrich and supplement written and photographic documentation and testimonies.

France started quite late in this archeology of the Second World War. why

In France, the system of preventive archeology provides that the state decides whether to excavate the land according to the scientific or heritage interests of its remains, as assessed during the preliminary diagnosis. However, it was not until the end of 2013 that the remains of the modern era were considered part of the heritage. This is not to say that archaeologists have not previously discovered remains of recent conflicts, in Normandy during World War II and in northern and eastern France for the First. And so the adventure began, because we were going to excavate Neolithic, Gallic, Roman or Medieval sites and in this case we found remains related to the World Wars, which are often considered elements of pollution! Some researchers began to study them independently, others evacuated them because there was no public order.