• January 10, 2026 | 8:00 AM - 11:00 AM
• Continental 5, Ballroom Level

7F: Heritage in and after Wartime (Colloquium)

Join Zoom here:

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87311528079?pwd=QyrCpjhkcCO29EZCOeaylFVD1PMfZ2.1

Organizers:
Thea De Armond, New Mexico State University, and Lindsay Der, University of British Columbia

Overview Statement:
According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), 2023 saw a record number of armed conflicts, the most since the UCDP began gathering data in 1946. The data for 2024 have yet to be processed, but optimism seems misplaced. Three out of the last four years saw record-level armed conflict.

Despite the existence of a (too-often) disregarded body of international law calling for the protection of heritage during wartime, heritage and heritage workers have long been entangled in war, both targets and “incidental” casualties of conflict. This entanglement is both a byproduct of heritage’s relationship to politics—the grounds for its being targeted—and the simple outcome of war’s ceaseless spread. New questions about heritage—restoration (or not?) of destroyed heritage, commemoration (or not?) of wartime trauma—emerge in the wake of war. Increasingly, archaeologists must attend to the ways in which war shapes their work.

This session is interested in archaeology and heritage work during and after war. We particularly emphasize the experiences of local stakeholders (including but not exclusive to project collaborators), as well as what archaeologists (local and nonlocal) can do to support them. Accordingly, several of our papers detail the responses of collaborative, international projects to recent or ongoing conflict: “The Tigrai War: Impacts on Cultural Heritage and Archaeological Research” discusses archaeological research practices in the context of the recent conflict in Tigrai, Ethiopia; “Archaeology, Heritage, and Community During War: The Jebel Barkal Archaeological Project” examines the role of collaborative organization in facilitating site protection during the ongoing war in Sudan; and “Looted Coins, Scholarship, and Heritage Preservation in Contemporary Ukraine” considers the ethics of using looted materials as scholarly evidence during unstable times. Other papers contemplate the resonances of heritage in wartime or postwar contexts: “Ethnogenesis and Monitoring Imperiled Cultural Heritage in Postwar Nagorno-Karabakh” discusses the politics undergirding site destruction and protection in the Caucasus; “Safeguarding for Whom? Examining the Beneficiaries of Disruptive Technology in the Conservation of Sites Destroyed by Armed Conflict” interrogates the reception of a 3D reproduction of the Triumphal Arch of Tadmor (Palmyra); finally, “Recreating at a Site of Atrocity in Central Europe” analyzes the commemoration—or, rather, lack thereof—of the post-World-War-II expulsion of Germans from a resort town in the Czech Republic. Ultimately, this session aims to spark dialogue both on the impact of war on cultural heritage, and on the ways that scholars can and should respond to it.