******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. *****************************************************************
If you've been following this admittedly complex thread, you might recall that Furr held up the report of Dominika Siemińska as absolving Stalin. According to him, if this Polish archaeologist found physical evidence indicting the Nazis, how can anybody blame Stalin?
I just received a PDF copy of a book titled "The Materiality of Troubled Pasts: Archaeologies of Conflicts and Wars" from one of the 3 editors. Generally, I have access to just about everything from Columbia or other research libraries through Borrow Direct or ILL but in this case the book was not available from Columbia or Amazon.
I was interested in an article by Dominika Siemińska in the book titled "Archaeological Studies on World War II Totalitarianism in the Yard of a Mediaeval Hill Fort in Volodymyr-Volynskyi, Ukraine". I plan to give it a thorough review but in the meantime this excerpt from the article will give you an idea of Furr's reliability:
In the case of Grave no. 4, excavated artefacts, the method of execution, and observations of taphonomical and post-depositional processes allow us to classify the remains as murder victims of the NKVD from 1940 or the first half of 1941. The majority were men as confirmed by recovered objects, garment fragments and anthropological analyses (Iwanek 2013). Footwear examples with elements cut off and primitive repairs can indicate that these persons had spent quite long periods in prison. It is possible they were the people building defensive embankments in the area of Volodymyr. On the one hand, objects such as large quantities of coins, knives or tool sets could not belong to people imprisoned for a long period and, therefore the victims could have been people murdered directly after being arrested (Głowacki 1997: 21–23). On the other hand, fragments of uniforms and military equipment indicate soldiers and policemen were part of this group of victims.
Studying Grave no. 5, we can suppose that the execution coincided with the earliest dates of coins found with the year 1939. The characteristics of execution itself and the method of burial indicate the methods of NKVD. Most skulls have bullet inlets in occipital bones and their diameter is about 8 mm. Probably, guns in the calibre of 7.62 or 7.65 mm were used. The individuals were shot in the back of the head and at a location outside the grave. All were adult men either civilian or soldier. These facts are confirmed by the garment fragments, footwear, equipment, and personal objects recovered by excavation. These people may have been representatives of administration, officials, functionaries, political and social activists, landowners or soldiers, all murdered after the Soviet army entered the territory and new authority structures were established (Filar 2012: 40–42; Bass 2013).
_________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
