archaeography

Barbed wire from Spanish Civil War trenches in the Complutense University of Madrid, discovered during an archaeological survey in November 2008.

If I had to choose one artifact alone to define the 20th century, I would probably choose barbed wire. It is the material link between trenches, concentration camps, refugee camps, prisons, international borders, rich mansions, segregated cities, the deforestation of the Amazon forest.

Barbed wire is the type-fossil of supermodernity.

(See Reviel Netz, Barbed wire: an ecology of modernity, Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 2004)