ABSTRACT
Conflict creates a culture of its own. It is more than soldiers and their battles; conflict, or even the fear of conflict, transforms whole societies, as individuals must react in often unexpected ways to the tensions and destruction of war and the social, political and economic problems that are its enduring legacy. Modern conflict archaeology, as a multidisciplinary endeavour, responds to the complexities of these situations, and through its anthropological focus on material culture investigates and seeks to make sense of the material consequences of modern industrialised war (e.g. Saunders 2004, 2012; Saunders and Cornish 2009). Within this, the documentation and analysis of the human body occupies a central position, and the issue of the treatment of the war dead emerges with particular salience (Capdevila and Voldman 2006). This chapter will focus on one aspect of this, by exploring in a systematic way, and from a new perspective, what burial acts reveal about the wider conflict at the scales of individuals, social groups and cultures.
