Editorial [Fate of the Defeated]
- Cet article est une traduction de :
- Éditorial [Le sort des vaincus] [fr]
- Autre(s) traduction(s) de cet article :
- Editorial [La suerte de los vencidos] [es]
Texte intégral
1This issue of Archéopages, dedicated to the “fate of the defeated”, coincides with the exhibition “Les Désastres de la guerre 1800–2014” (“The Disasters of War, 1800–2014”) which ran at the Louvre-Lens museum from 28 May to 6 October 2014 and on the occasion of the conference, co-organised by Inrap, on “The archaeology of violence, war violence, mass violence”. The aim of this meeting was to evaluate the insights archaeology can bring to research on collective violence and war and to demonstrate how it can contribute to present-day discussions.
2No one can ignore the fate of the defeated, be it the subject of propaganda, of information, or of awareness campaigns, whether censored, or approved and disseminated. The media show us time and again images of “victims” and the impact of these images is strong, sometimes even determining the course of events. Such images – such facts – impose themselves on us, and influence the way we debate and sometimes re-write our contemporary history.
3Over the last few decades archaeology has, thanks to large open-area excavations, made us re-examine critically the history of conflicts. Wars and armed confrontation are no longer just reported in the archives of the winning side but studied by archaeologists who take into account the sum of the evidence uncovered: battlefields, deposits of weapons, human remains, garrisons, prisoners of war camps, internment camps, etc. Attempts are made to deconstruct the propaganda, to place images and objects in their contexts, to reconstruct the economic and social framework in which the conflict took place, and to analyse the reality of collective violence.
4The publication in 1957 of Gilbert-Charles Picard’s monumental work (Les Trophées romains. Contribution à l’Histoire de la religion et de l’art triomphal de Rome, BEFAR 187, 534 pp.) gave archaeologists and historians of ancient art a meticulous study of the Roman (but also Greek) mystique surrounding victory and the fate of the vanquished. Archaic trophies were “erected on the battlefield to absorb, fix and render ineffective the evil forces that permeate them and would otherwise surely harm people: these are the souls of the fallen warriors, and especially the destructive demons who contributed to the defeat and who could well become dangerous to the victors if left free” (p. 31). At the end of the last century, investigations conducted in Gallia Belgica (at Ribemont-sur-Ancre in particular) have renewed our vision of Gaulish warrior sanctuaries. This issue of Archéopages brings to light new evidence about such Celtic practices in victory, presenting a remarkable deposit of weapons and severed heads found at the Cailar in the Gard and dated to the third century BC, as well as a study of the Gaulish tropaeum of Décines in the département of the Rhône. But most space is dedicated here to the contribution archaeology has made to our understanding of the fate of the defeated in modern and recent times, ranging from the destruction of Thérouanne in 1553 to the POWs’ camps of the Second World War, via the treatment of the bodies of the victims of the battle of Le Mans in 1793 and of those in the last two World Wars. These contributions complement the written sources and the figurative documentation in a more direct manner than for earlier periods; they blow the cobwebs off the historic documents and challenge all of us.
5Although no Gallo-Roman and medieval case studies feature in this issue, these periods are alluded to in the lively debate organised by Michel Tarpin and Michel Signoli: history, art history and archaeology find themselves enriched by the contribution of human physical anthropology and the socio-cultural analysis of the relationship between the victors and the vanquished.
6At a time when a new trend in history considers the advantages of war (see Ian Morris, War ! What is it Good For?: Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots, ed, by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014, 512 pp.), the current issue of Archéopages sheds light on the fate of the defeated through space and time and shows that the archaeology of collective violence plays a full part in the preoccupations of the social and human sciences, in a precise, sensitive and heuristic manner.
Table des illustrations
![]() |
|
|---|---|
| Titre | Common pit with German soldiers at the Bavent site (Calvados). |
| Crédits | Photo : Jean Desloges, Ministry of Culture and Communication. |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/archeopages/docannexe/image/17720/img-1.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 905k |
Pour citer cet article
Référence électronique
Dominique Garcia, « Editorial [Fate of the Defeated] », Archéopages [En ligne], 39 | 2013-2014 [2014], mis en ligne le 09 avril 2024, consulté le 12 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/archeopages/17720 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/archeopages.17720
Haut de pageDroits d’auteur
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont susceptibles d’être soumis à des autorisations d’usage spécifiques.
Haut de page





