The archaeology of disappearance

The disappearance of people has defined political violence during the twentieth and twenty‐first centuries. In this chapter, the author focuses on the wider political economy of disappearance in the context of supermodernity and explores the possibilities offered by archaeology to reveal the functioning of such economy. He describes the modes in which power disappears in supermodernity. The author explores the forms of continuity between material and human disappearance and what this reveals of supermodern rationality. It examines the elimination of the traces of annihilation. The work of disappearance implies simultaneously three phenomena: concealment, virtualization, and dispersal. If annihilation is one of the signs of supermodernity, another is the disappearance of its traces. The political economy of disappearance is one of the distinctive features of our era.

Conflict archaeology. Forensic archaeology. Archaeology of the contemporary past.