Enfants de la patrie: Historical Archaeologies of National Identity and Nationalism

Since the Peace of Westphalia (1648) and the start of the French Revolution (1789), the western world has seen a rapid rise in modern conceptualisations of national identity and the nation state, as extensively studied and theoretised by historians. While historical archaeology has a rich tradition of studying ethnicity and race, it has traditionally been somewhat less willing to look at how archaeological data and archaeological practice form and inform the concept of national identity in the post-1500 period, the formation of the modern nation state over the same period, and how this identity is intimately and inseparably entangled with, yet still distinct from, ethnicity and race. The present session seeks not only to present specific case studies of the historical archaeology of national identity, but also to examine and critique the study of nationalism within historical archaeology specifically, as opposed to archaeology generally.