Madeleine Mant

Individual and group identity in WWII commemorative sites

Abstract Five sites commemorating large-scale mortuary events are compared in order to discover how individual and collective identities are created, maintained, and lost in memorials such as cemeteries and monuments. These five sites, the American Military Cemetery in Normandy, France; the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, USA; Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, USA; Auschwitz-Birkenau outside Oświęcim, Poland; and Treblinka outside Malkinia, Poland, are locations that memorialise thousands of people and are linked through their connection to the events of World War II. The creation of military and prisoner identities during the war is analysed and the factors affecting commemoration are identified. The sites are analysed according to their geographic location, headstone designs, organisation, and erected monuments. Four commonalities among these commemorative sites are identified: symbolic location, attention to symmetry, the heterogeneous nature of the dead being subsumed into the collective identity, and the dead being given an artificial equality.

Time after time: individuals with multiple fractures and injury recidivists in long eighteenth-century (c. 1666–1837) London

Investigating injury recidivism and individuals with multiple injuries is an area of growing interest in bioarchaeology. Differentiating between whether an individual sustained multiple injuries, represented by antemortem healed fractures, in one incident or in multiple incidents over the life course, is a major challenge. This research analyzed the skeletal remains of 721 adults (402 males, 319 females) from five post-medieval cemeteries from London, UK, known to include working class individuals for evidence of skeletal trauma - fractures, myositis ossificans, subluxations/dislocations, blunt force trauma, and sharp force trauma. A total of 164 individuals had more than two fractures; males were significantly more likely to have multiple (2+) fractures than females. An investigation of fracture recidivism incorporating a relative timeline of fracture events was possible because 14 individuals (12 males, two females) were identified as injury recidivists, meaning they had a combination of antemortem healed, antemortem healing, and/or perimortem fractures. This paper examines the distribution and relative timing of these fractures, incorporating contemporary clinical as well as social and historical context, noting that the majority of the fractures were likely to be caused by accidental mechanisms.

‘Readmitted under urgent circumstance’: uniting archives and bioarchaeology at the Royal London Hospital

The frequency of hospital admissions due to fracture at the Royal London Hospital in London, United Kingdom during the late 18th and early 19th centuries was assessed using skeletal and archival data. Uniting these disparate sources of data revealed contradictory fracture prevalence results. A comparison of fractures by body areas (dictated by the diagnostic labels used in the archival admission records) revealed statistically significant differences ( p <0.05): the male group displayed a greater proportion of cranial, torso, hand, and foot fractures in the skeletal dataset and a higher proportion of arm and leg fractures in the archival dataset. The female group showed a significantly higher proportion of torso fractures in the skeletal sample and leg fractures in the admission records dataset. This paper raises biocultural questions concerning individuals’ lived trauma experience and choice to seek medical treatment for certain types of fractures.