Meanwhile, the Allies prepared for the war to stretch into 1919, not realizing victory was possible so soon. Some of its commanders believed that the tide was turning irrevocably in favor of Germany’s enemies as one of them, Crown Prince Rupprecht, wrote on July 20, “We stand at the turning point of the war: what I expected first for the autumn, the necessity to go over to the defensive, is already on us, and in addition all the gains which we made in the spring-such as they were-have been lost again.” Still, Erich Ludendorff, the German commander in chief, refused to accept this reality and rejected the advice of his senior commanders to pull back or begin negotiations. This not only contributes to the development of archaeology in the study of the Western Front but by viewing the war in a different manner, archaeology can also construct a different remembrance of the conflict.On August 8, 1918, the Allies launch a series of offensive operations against German positions on the Western Front during World War I with a punishing attack at Amiens, on the Somme River in northwestern France.Īfter heavy casualties incurred during their ambitious spring 1918 offensive, the bulk of the German army was exhausted, and its morale was rapidly disintegrating amid a lack of supplies and the spreading influenza epidemic. Utilising postprocessual landscape theories, this ethnography will explore how soldiers reacted to the trenches, weapons and the threat of death and mutilation in the war landscape. This paper will demonstrate this potential by using archive material from British soldiers who served on the battlefields to construct an ethnographic study of the Western Front.
This information which has already been rigorously studied by historians, can be reinvigorated by using archaeological research questions which address unexplored aspects of the conflict. The vast amount of archive material available forms an as yet untapped source of data to examine the landscapes, spaces and material culture of the war.
This however is not the only way in which the interests of archaeology can be served. Excavations provide a viewpoint into the materiality and spatial dimension of the world’s first industrialised conflict. The archaeology of the battlefields of the Western Front has provided an alternative perspective in the development of a new agenda in Great War studies.
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