The Scream of the Butterfly:The Aftermath of Massacre Landscapes

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Landscapes of Death: Placemaking and Postmortem Agencies" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Context and history are crucial to examine when interpreting both local and broader implications and effects of mass killings and massacres. Massacre scholars have shown that political-economic and cultural events shape the ideas of the perpetrators who become convinced that a massacre is the only option to solve a perceived problem. But local dynamics shape the why, when, how and where of any given massacre. Thus massacres are fraught with symbolic and real meanings.These factors come together to shape and define the landscapes and spaces where massacres occur. For massacre events in the past, working backwards from the aftermath can illuminate the reasoning and diversity of expression (who is killed and how they are killed) for massacres.Case studies on massacre landscapes in small scale societies are presented to demonstrate the usefulness of extending the analysis of sites of mass killings into the ways that the landscapes and spaces of prior violence are variously reused, memorialized or avoided in the aftermath.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Landscapes of Death: Placemaking and Postmortem Agencies

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50218