Excavating Soldier Deaths: A Study of Changing Burial Practices

This study argues that warfare is permeated by attitudes toward death, and that the history of war is also a history of these changing attitudes. By focusing on body disposal and burial practices, the article traces when and how soldiers—once regarded as simple military instruments—started to be conceived as individuals qua individuals, eventually becoming the hardly expendable beings that we know today. Although a focus on disposal and burial practices might sound fanciful, how corpses are dealt with can suggest whether, and in what ways, individuals are important to the living. It can also shed light on the origins of a variety of current phenomena, such as casualty sensitivity, post-heroic warfare, and risk-transfer militarism.