Archaeology of the border: the World War Two Gothic Line (Italy) - Archäologie der Grenze: Die Gotische Linie des Zweiten Weltkrieges in Italien

In the mountains of Versilia, northern Tuscany, Italy, the aftermath of World War Two events can still be perceived in both landscape features and the memories of the inhabitants. Reminiscences of the violent fights between Nazi fascist troops and partisans on the steep slopes, through the woods, and in rocky bunkers can still be observed in the area around the fortification of the Gothic Line. The personal memories of the citizens are deeply entangled with the tangible traces of those heinous days, while commemorative monuments are scattered in the landscape to commemorate all the civilians murdered as retaliation against partisans. The project ‘Archaeology of the border’ got underway in 2021 to understand the everyday life of all the actors who interacted along the Gothic Line border in 1944–45, adopting a holistic approach that merges archaeology and anthropology in order to investigate the tangible and intangible traces as a unique palimpsest. It is based upon the combined analysis of archive documents, aerial photographs and cartography, field survey, excavations, spatial and statistical analyses, anthropological fieldwork and ethnographic data collection, interviews, ethnography of ritual moments and commemorations and surveys of monuments, memorial plaques and graves. This contribution covers the project’s first phase, i.e. the analysis of the war taskscape through archaeological surveys that allowed us to collect