The materiality of forced labour: settlement waste of communities at WWII mining plant and PoW camp in Rolava (North-West Bohemia)

ABSTRACT The paper deals with archaeological, osteological and archaeobotanical analysis of the artefacts and ecofacts obtained by excavation in waste landfills from the Second World War. The settlement waste was produced by three communities with different social status, which were connected with the Rolava mining and processing plant in the Ore Mountains in western Bohemia. The plant was built to supply the war industry of the Third Reich with non-ferrous metals, especially tin, and after World War II it was abandoned and turned into a complex archaeological site. The communities settled here included German civilian specialists, but also prisoners of war performing forced labour from the ranks of members of the Allied armies and the Red Army. The interdisciplinary analysis of the settlement waste has brought numerous new insights into one of the most significant modern archaeological sites in Central Europe and everyday life in the context of the largest war conflict in human history.