Landscapes of fear : cultural and societal responses to vegetation on contested and abandoned killing sites

The article proposes a search for new, inclusive methodologies that could be applied to the study of mass grave sites. To include mass grave sites into social imaginaries as described by Taylor, the historical and archaeological research need to be accompanied by cultural and anthropological research. State-orchestrated memorial initiatives, centralised memory projects and transnational activist networks oftentimes fail to save a mass grave site from oblivion. That may be due to the lack of thorough analysis of indigenous commemoration practices (or, to put it in other words: positive and negative acts of referring to a post-conflict site). The author advocates a cultural analysis of mass grave meanings, which includes both the societal as well as the communal level.