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This paper explores the practical and conceptual connections between the archaeology of post-industrial societies and the process of reverse engineering. It explores common themes such as industrial decline, the loss of technical expertise, and the growing problem of obsolescence both in technological infrastructure and in the management of digital data. To illuminate the connections between the two fields it considers several examples. These include the implicit applications of reverse engineering in archaeology, such as chemical analyses of Egyptian mummification and alchemical equipment, as well as the use of archaeological concepts and terminologies in reverse engineering. The concept of archaeology as reverse engineering is examined with regard to military aircraft, post-industrial landscapes and so-called 'non-places'. These illustrate the difficulty in inferring different forms of human activity and knowledge in past technologies, in particular so-called 'tacit knowledge'. The final part of the paper discusses the potentials and limitations of building links between reverse engineering and the archaeology of the modern world, raising questions for further consideration.

The growing interest in archaeologies of the recent past has included attempts to link archaeology with memory in its various forms but has lacked a coherent theoretical and methodological approach. This paper outlines a model for engaging with memory in the archaeology of the Second World War, drawing on recent work in memory studies and oral history. One of the principal pitfalls in memory work is the conflation and confusion of individual and social memory: in this paper I attempt to identify and outline different forms or scales of memory: individual memory, group narratives, and social memorialisation. If we distinguish between these models in relation to Second World War archaeological sites we can assess their accuracy and usefulness and begin to trace the intricate power relations implicit in memory work. The sites in question, a Nazi prison in Berlin and a Prisoner of War camp in Poland, illustrate the contested and highly politicised nature of memory-based work and archaeological studies of this period. By opening up such sites to the popular gaze, archaeologists have the power to bring these debates into the public sphere, potentially undermining the hegemony of officially sanctioned memory and making the production of meaningful pasts a more inclusive process.

Human remains are a fundamental part of the archaeological record, offering unique insights into the lives of individuals and populations in the past. Like many archaeological materials human remains require distinctive and specialised methods of recovery, analysis and interpretation, while technological innovations and the accumulation of expertise have enabled archaeologists to extract ever greater amounts of information from assemblages of skeletal material. Alongside analyses of new finds, these advances have consistently thrown new light on existing collections of human remains in museums, universities and other institutions. Given the powerful emotional, social and religious meanings attached to the dead body, it is perhaps unsurprising that human remains pose a distinctive set of ethical questions for archaeologists. With the rise of indigenous rights movements and the emergence of post-colonial nations the acquisition and ownership of human remains became a divisive and politically loaded issue. It became increasingly clear that many human remains in museum collections around the world represented the traces of colonial exploitation and discredited pseudo-scientific theories of race. In the light of these debates and changing attitudes, some human remains were returned or repatriated to their communities of origin, a process which continues to this day. Recently a new set of challenges to the study of human remains has emerged from a rather unexpected direction: the British government revised its interpretation of nineteenth-century burial legislation in a way that would drastically curtail the ability of archaeologists to study human remains of any age excavated in England and Wales. This paper examines these extraordinary events and the legal, political and ethical questions that they raise.