ABSTRACT
As first-hand memory of the twentieth century's major conflicts fades, our view of events is increasingly determined by interpretations of material culture by those alienated from its production and original purpose. The immense production of material culture during industrialized conflict and the extremes of human behaviours which it embodies and provokes, suggests that in a very real sense we can begin to talk about the ‘cosmology of war’. The transformational power of industrialized conflict is evident at every scale of human activity, and can be tracked through a variety of materialities and across disciplinary boundaries. Significantly, this role envelops the small ‘memory object’ within the larger one that is the palimpsest of multivocal landscapes of the Great War. In Europe, concerns extend from the First World War of 1914–18 to the Bosnian conflict of 1992–5, and intersect the materialities of religious belief, and forensic investigations associated with ethnic cleansing and genocide.
