Dissonant material memory of enduring civil conflict: snapshots from Belfast, Northern Ireland

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology of Urban Dissonance: Violence, Friction, and Change" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Belfast is a city that has been made and remade through cycles of violence in its 400-year history. This has been through both conscious and unconscious means, from bombings and riots to the forced movement of communities into newly environments. The material memory of conflict is retrievable in various forms in the cityscape – through memorial plaques and gardens, peace walls, urban planning and road infrastucture – that overlap, contradict and can act to reinforce the conflict of the past into the present. Not all of the conflicts of the past have been resolved. Memorials and murals have been strategically inserted and added to over time to disrupt attempts at placemaking that try to bypass calls for social justice. This paper will present a number of case-studies from Belfast that will explore the material memory of conflict and how it shapes and directs the dissonant city in the contemporary.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeology of Urban Dissonance: Violence, Friction, and Change   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2021

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology