Ethics and the Archaeology of Violence

Gabriel Moshenska is Lecturer in Public Archaeology at UCL, where he coordinates the MA in Public Archaeology and teaches the archaeology of modern conflict.  He has a PhD in the archaeology, material culture and memory of the Second World War.  His research interests are wide-ranging in the extreme.  He has published studies of children and material culture; the history of Egyptian mummy unwrappings in nineteenth century Britain; Mortimer Wheeler’s philosophy and practice of public archaeology; gas masks; archaeological ghost stories; air warfare and commemoration; the ethics of burial archaeology; Rudyard Kipling; the economics of archaeology; the archaeology of internment and imprisonment; alternative or ‘fringe’ archaeologies; ‘absent’ heritage; community archaeology; cultural memory; the archaeology of air raid shelters; and the contested reception of Milton’s theological writings in the early nineteenth century.  He is currently working on a biography of the surgeon andantiquarian Thomas Joseph Pettigrew. Alfredo González-Ruibal is a staff scientist at the Institute of Heritage Sciences (Incipit) of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). He holds a PhD in Prehistoric Archaeology from the Complutense University of Madrid. His research focuses on the archaeology of the contemporary past and material culture. He has traced the destructive operations of modernity (war, dictatorship, colonialism and predatory capitalism) through the archaeological record in Spain, Ethiopia, Equatorial Guinea and Brazil. He has also investigated the role of material culture in resisting modernity and the state.  An outcome of this latter work is An archaeology of resistance: time and materiality in an African borderland (forthcoming), based on a long-running project in Ethiopia. His research on the contemporary past has been published in major journals (Current Anthropology, Antiquity, World Archaeology). He has recently completed a project on the archaeological remains of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship. He is co-editor of the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology (Equinox Press) and of the volume Reclaiming Archaeology: Beyond the tropes of modernity (Routledge, 2013).