Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T04:22:31.608Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Monument and material reuse at the National Memorial Arboretum

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 May 2014

Howard Williams
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Exploring the relocation and reuse of fragments and whole artefacts, materials and monuments in contemporary commemorative memorials in the United Kingdom (UK), this paper focuses on the National Memorial Arboretum (Alrewas, Staffordshire, hereafter NMA). Within this unique assemblage of memorial gardens, reuse constitutes a distinctive range of material commemoration. Through a detailed investigation of the NMA's gardens, this paper shows how monument and material reuse, while used in very different memorial forms, tends to be reserved to commemorate specific historical subjects and themes. Monument and material reuse is identified as a form of commemorative rehabilitation for displaced memorials and provides powerful and direct mnemonic and emotional connections between past and present in the commemoration through peace memorials, of military disasters and defensive actions, the sufferings of prisoners of war, and atrocities inflicted upon civilian populations. In exploring monument and material reuse to create specific emotive and mnemonic fields and triggers, this paper engages with a hitherto neglected aspect of late 20th- and early 21st-century commemorative culture.

Keywords

commemorationdeathgardensmemorialmemorypeace
Type
Articles
Information
Archaeological Dialogues , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , June 2014 , pp. 75 - 102
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Andreassen, E., Bjerck, H. and Olsen, B., 2010: Persistent memories. Pyramiden – a Soviet mining town in the High Arctic, Trondheim.Google Scholar
Ashplant, T.G., Dawson, G. and Roper, M., 2000: The politics of war memory and commemoration. Contexts, structures and dynamics, in Ashplant, T.G., Dawson, G. and Roper, M. (eds), Commemorating war. The politics of memory, New Brunswick and London, 3–85.Google Scholar
Black, J., 2004: Thanks for the memory. War memorials, spectatorship and the trajectories of commemoration 1919–2001, in Saunders, N.J. (ed.), Matters of conflict. Material culture, memory and the First World War, London, 134–48.Google Scholar
Borić, D. (ed.), 2010: Archaeology and memory, Oxford.Google Scholar
Bradley, R., 2002: The past in prehistoric societies, London.Google Scholar
Bradley, R.J., and Williams, H. (eds), 1998: The past in the past. The reuse of ancient monuments, World archaeology 30 (1).Google Scholar
Brilliant, R., and Kinney, D. (eds), 2011: Reuse value. Spolia and appropriation in art and architecture from Constantine to Sherrie Levine, Farnham.Google Scholar
Buchli, V., 2010: Memory, melancholy and materiality, in Borić, D. (ed.), Archaeology and memory, Oxford, 204–10.Google Scholar
Childs, D., 2008: Growing remembrance. The story of the National Memorial Arboretum, Barnsley.Google Scholar
Cornish, P., 2004: ‘Sacred relics’: objects in the Imperial War Museum 1917–39, in Saunders, N.J. (ed.), Matters of conflict. Material culture, memory and the First World War, London, 35–50.Google Scholar
Doss, E., 2007: War porn. Spectacle and seduction in contemporary American war memorials, in Schubart, R., Virchow, F., White-Stanley, D. and Thomas, T. (eds), War isn't hell, it's entertainment. Essays on visual media and the representation of conflict, London and Jefferson, NC, 13–30.Google Scholar
Doss, E., 2008: War, memory and the public mediation of affect. The National World War II Memorial and American imperialism, Memory studies 1, 227–50.Google Scholar
Doss, E., 2010: Memory mania. Public feeling in America, Chicago.Google Scholar
Filippucci, P., 2010: Archaeology and memory on the Western Front, in Borić, D. (ed.), Archaeology and memory, Oxford, 171–82.Google Scholar
Gough, P., 1998: Memorial gardens as dramaturgical space, International journal of heritage studies 3 (4), 119–214.Google Scholar
Gough, P., 2004: Corporations and commemoration. First World War remembrance, Lloyds TSB and the National Memorial Arboretum, International journal of heritage studies 10 (5), 435–55.Google Scholar
Gough, P., 2009: ‘Garden of gratitude’. The National Memorial Arboretum and strategic remembering, in Ashton, P. and Kean, H. (eds), People and their pasts. Public history today. London, 95–112.Google Scholar
Hamilakis, Y., 2011: Archaeological ethnography. A multitemporal meeting ground for archaeology and anthropology, Annual review of anthropology 40, 399–414.Google Scholar
Harris, O., and Sørensen, T.F., 2010: Rethinking emotion and material culture, Archaeological dialogues 17 (2), 145–63.Google Scholar
Harrison, R., 2011: Surface assemblages. Towards an archaeology in and of the present, Archaeological dialogues 18 (2), 141–71.Google Scholar
Harrison, R., and Schofield, J., 2010: After modernity. Archaeological approaches to the contemporary past, Oxford.Google Scholar
Holtorf, C., 1996: Towards a chronology of megaliths. Understanding monumental time and cultural memory, Journal of European archaeology 4, 119–52.Google Scholar
Holtorf, C., 2003: Dyster star dösen, in Williams, H. (ed.), Archaeologies of remembrance. Death and memory in past societies, Kluwer, pp. 281–99.Google Scholar
Holtorf, C., 2005: From Stonehenge to Las Vegas. Archaeology as popular culture, Walnut Creek, CA.Google Scholar
Holtorf, C., 2009: On the possibility of time travel, Lund archaeological review 15, 31–41.Google Scholar
Holtorf, C., 2010: The presence of pastness. Themed environments and beyond, in Schlehe, J., Uike-Bormann, M., Oesterle, C. and Hochbruck, W. (eds), Staging the past. Themed environments in transcultural perspectives, Bielefeld, 23–40.Google Scholar
Holtorf, C., and Williams, H., 2006: Landscapes and memories, in Hicks, D. and Beaudray, M. (eds), Cambridge companion to historical archaeology, Cambridge, 235–54.Google Scholar
Legendre, J.-P., 2001: Archaeology of World War I. The Lancaster bomber of Fléville (Meurthe-et-Moselle, France), in Buchli, V. and Lucas, G. (eds), Archaeologies of the contemporary past, London, 126–38.Google Scholar
Llillios, K.T., and Tasamis, V., 2010: Material mnemonics. Everyday memory in prehistoric Europe, Oxford.Google Scholar
Mills, B., and Walker, W.H. (eds), 2008: Archaeologies of material practices, Sante Fe.Google Scholar
Moriarty, C., 1999: Review article. The material culture of Great War remembrance, Journal of contemporary history 34 (4), 653–62.Google Scholar
Moshenska, G., 2008: A hard rain. Children's shrapnel collections in the Second World War, Journal of material culture 13 (1), 107–25.Google Scholar
Moshenska, G., 2010: Working with memory in the field of modern conflict, Cambridge archaeological journal 20 (1), 33–48.Google Scholar
National Memorial Arboretum (NMA), 2009: Remember. Their names will live for evermore . . . The National Memorial Arboretum. Your guide. Alrewas.Google Scholar
National Memorial Arboretum (NMA), 2012: National Memorial Arboretum guidebook, 4th edn, Alrewas.Google Scholar
Rowlands, M., 1999: Remembering to forget. Sublimation as sacrifice in war memorials, in Forty, A. and Küchler, S. (eds), The art of forgetting, Oxford, 129–45.Google Scholar
Saunders, N.J., 2003: Crucifix, calvary, and cross. Materiality and spirituality in Great War landscapes, World archaeology 35 (1), 7–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saunders, N.J., 2007: Killing time. The archaeology of the First World War, Stroud.Google Scholar
Sørensen, T.F., 2010: A saturated void. Anticipating and preparing presence in contemporary Danish cemetery culture, in Bille, M., Hastrup, F. and Sørensen, T.F. (eds), An anthropology of absence, New York, 115–30.Google Scholar
Thäte, E.S., 2007: Monuments and minds. Monument re-use in Scandinavia in the second half of the first millennium AD, Lund (Acta Archaeologica Lundensia Series in 4° No 27).Google Scholar
Van Dyke, R., and Alcock, S. (eds), 2003: Archaeologies of memory, Oxford.Google Scholar
Walls, S., and Williams, H., 2010: Death and memory on the home front. Second World War commemoration in the South Hams, Devon, Cambridge archaeological journal 20 (1), 49–66.Google Scholar
Williams, H., 1997: Ancient landscapes and the dead. The reuse of prehistoric and Roman monuments as early Anglo-Saxon burial sites, Medieval archaeology 41, 1–31.Google Scholar
Williams, H. (ed.), 2003: Archaoelogies of remembrance. Death and memory in past societies, New York.Google Scholar
Williams, H., 2011: Archaeologists on contemporary death, Mortality 16 (2), 91–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williams, H., 2012: Ash and antiquity. Archaeology and cremation in contemporary Sweden, in Jones, A.M., Pollard, J., Allen, M.J. and Gardiner, J. (eds), Image, memory and monumentality. Archaeological engagements with the material world, Oxford, 207–17.Google Scholar
Williams, H., 2013: Antiquity at the National Memorial Arboretum, International journal of heritage studies 20 (4), DOI: 10.1080/13527258.2012.757556.Google Scholar
Young, J.E., 1993: The texture of memory, New Haven.Google Scholar