Lexicon of Katyn Archaeology (1990–2015)

The interdisciplinary research project “Lexicon of Katyn Archaeology (1990–2015)” aims to collect formerly dispersed material relating to research that was undertaken during the 1990s and early 2000s on traces of the Katyn Massacre of 1940, in which Soviet forces killed 22,000 Polish officers who were prisoners in the USSR. An important part of the project comprises ethnographic interviews with researchers and participants in archaeological work that took place at execution and burial sites. These interviews make it possible to reconstruct the course of the research and to identify significant aspects that sometimes escape historical studies, archaeological reports and analytical scientific texts, but that emerge from a biographical, personal and emotional context. The project also involves interviews with people whose biographies, experiences and memories are connected with the Katyn Massacre. These reveal the reception of the archaeological research by those with the most personal interest in it, as well as what is recorded in individual experience and family memory. They also indicate practised and postulated forms of commemoration

Archaeology · Art · Lexicon · Linguistics · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · History · Philosophy · Polish Historical and Cultural Studies · Polish-Jewish Holocaust Memory Studies