ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights some of the ambivalent properties of mass grave sites as places of horror, abjection, pollution, absence, and haunting, but also, conversely, as potential indices for ancestral bonds, collective sacrifice, and shared suffering, and a connection to the land. It looks at the affordances of the forensic process itself, how a forensic investigation radically reframes a site of mass violence, changing the narrative that surrounds it, and the reconstituting of the grave as a site of scientific enquiry. The chapter underscores the importance of situating the mass grave in its landscape, both forensically to understand the scale and complexity of a crime, and culturally to understand how a mass grave is conceptualised within a network of sites with interdependent mnemonic and historical meanings. It emphasises the mass grave as a focal point and as a bounded site in the landscape that can become emblematic of a complex sequence of events.
