On Wednesday 2nd September, the 21st Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists gets underway, hosted by the University of Glasgow, Scotland.
Researchers from the Lapland’s Dark Heritage project are active on Saturday 5th September in a session titled ‘Dark Heritage: The Archaeology of Internment and Forced Wartime Migration’. Suzie Thomas is co-chairing the session, and Oula Seitsonen is presentinga paper entitled ‘World War 2 forced migrations in the Arctic: Cultural heritage and the evacuation and destruction of Finnish Lapland in 1944’.
The session abstract is:
Last year’s EAA conference session ‘Archaeologies of War(s)’ considered a century of conflict from a perspective focused
mainly, though not exclusively, on battlefield archaeology. The last one hundred years has also seen the making of war on
civilians developed to an unprecedented level and it is perhaps timely to contemplate the cultural legacy of civilian detention,
internment and forced migration which has become a significant aspect of industrialised and sometimes global war. Systematised restriction of civilian populations, sometimes involving privation and even mistreatment, was by no means a new departure at the onset of WWI, and was pursued with still greater purpose during WWII. Even the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has not entirely prevented 21st century iterations of such behaviours, particularly where political and terrorist issues are involved.The deliberate displacement, concentration and incarceration of mass populations had many side-effects which have left varied physical and cultural legacies among both victims and perpetrators. For most it was a shocking or sometimes even fatal experience; for others an opportunity to seek diversions which resulted in extraordinary cultural and
artistic achievement. For those responsible it has led variously to guilt, redemption, cover-up and acknowledgement. In many
cases there is a distinctive residue of sudden mixing or removal of peoples and their material and ephemeral cultures. We consider the archaeological, museological and interpretative consequences of this dark heritage through contributions focused mainly, though not exclusively, on internment and forced displacement during the 19th and 20th centuries.
Oula’s paper’s abstract reads:
In the later part of World War 2 Finland and Nazi Germany were co-belligerents, with over 200 000 German soldiers holding the frontal responsibility in the northern half of Finnish eastern front. As a consequence of a major Russian offensive in 1944, Finland made a cease fire treaty with the Soviet Union: this treaty demanded Finns to drive out the German troops which resulted in a Finno-German “Lapland War” in 1944-45. Practically the whole civilian population of Lapland was evacuated to the southern parts of Finland and to Sweden before the outbreak of hostilities, excluding some reindeer herders who stayed behind in the fjells to look after the animal herds. Germans used the scorched earth tactics during their retreat to Norway, and destroyed the infrastructure within their reach and littered the landscape with explosives. In 1940-44, before the Lapland War, the relations between German troops and civilians in Lapland were generally cordial, but the post-war memories have been taken over by the powerful images of a homeland destroyed by fire and explosion, in both the official and private accounts. This appears to also colour the views of and engagement with the cultural heritage of the era. In this paper I review the experiences of Lapland’s evacuees, and assess the effects these incidents might have had on the way different communities signify the material remains of German presence. Also the material heritage of the evacuation itself is considered, for instance the refugee camps established in Sweden.
University of Glasgow Main Building, creative commons licence image by Deshi’
Oula and Suzie will be live-Tweeting from the conference on their accounts @oulaseitsonen and @SuzieElizabethT, as well as the project’s Twitter account @DarkLapland.