Holocaust Archaeologies: Approaches and Future Directions by Caroline Sturdy Colls (review)

Holocaust studies was initially the purview of historians, who, poring over millions of pages of German documentation, were the first to try to reach a broader understanding of how and why the Holocaust occurred. The Holocaust is far too complex an atrocity for one discipline to comprehend, however, and successive areas of study have entered the field: literature, psychology, sociology, Jewish studies, and geography, to name just a few. What tends to be forgotten is that archaeology has been involved since the immediate postwar period. As Caroline Sturdy Colls notes in her impressive new volume, the roots of forensic archaeology are traceable to the collection of evidence—from thousands of mass graves—for use in post-Holocaust trials (p. 29). The legalistic intent of this fieldwork limited the contextual data recovered, however, and thus archaeology’s initial impact on the field.

Archaeology has much to add to Holocaust studies. Sturdy Colls makes clear that, as a spatial and temporal field, archaeology reveals how sites were founded, developed, and abandoned or destroyed; how they were internally organized and operated; and how they were connected to other sites and organizations. Archaeological research also yields evidence related to perpetrators’ and victims’ behavior, actions, and reactions—including victims’ acts of resistance—and provides clues to the ways in which sites were subsequently memorialized, forgotten, looted, or concealed within the local, regional, national, or international Holocaust memoryscape.

Unfortunately, the common misconceptions that most sites were investigated in the immediate postwar period and that archaeological research results in the total destruction and desecration of sites have prevented its methods from being fully accepted. Sturdy Colls is obviously passionate about the relevance of archaeology to Holocaust studies, and her professional experience investigating the death camp at Treblinka in Poland, the slave-labor camps on the Channel Island of Alderney, and the Semlin concentration camp in Serbia has made her acutely aware of the importance of being sensitive to the ramifications of this work. “The Holocaust was the epitome of disrespect for the beliefs and opinions of others,” she writes; “therefore, in our approach to its investigation, we should endeavor to have the utmost respect for the beliefs of those affected by these events, even when/especially when they may differ from our own. Not to do so would be to further disrespect the victims, their families, and their descendants” (p. 78).

Part I is devoted to contextualizing Holocaust archaeologies, and includes a summary of projects conducted over the years. The main emphasis of this section, however, is the in-depth overview of the ethical, political, and religious sensitivities and issues involved, including not only the demands of Jewish religious law (Halakha) but also the funerary obligations for Protestants, Catholics, and Roma and Sinti. Sturdy Colls stresses the need to involve the respective communities—local, national, transnational, and international as well as social, political, and religious—well before work begins. Although this has long been a part of archaeological protocol for the investigation of indigenous sites on many continents, European archaeologists rarely face such issues, and few sites in the world have such pervasive transnational and international implications. The author’s insights for navigating political and religious sensitivities are thus of great value to students and archaeologists considering entering the field, as well as to invested parties who wish to understand how archaeology can and should be conducted.

Part II is the technical and practical section of the volume. Sturdy Colls provides a detailed analysis of the non-invasive and non-intrusive methods and techniques available for the development of archaeological research plans for Holocaust sites, from initial planning through final artifact analysis and conservation. By basing the discussion on case studies drawn from her own work as well as others’, she offers a real-world foundation for those wishing to understand the relevance of archaeology to the study of the Holocaust and the requirements for working on such sites. Two particularly important sections in Part II concern the...