Cold War Archaeology
Kia ora, During a trip to the Republic of Korea (aka South Korea) in 2017 I came across a piece of the Berlin Wall standing in a small square in Seoul. The Berlin Wall was a concrete barrier that once physically and ideologically divided the city of Berlin in Germany. It came to symbolize the wider division of Western and Eastern Europe during the post-World War II conflict between "western Capitalism" (the USA and allies) and "eastern Communism" (the Soviet Union and allies) known as the Cold War . The piece of this monument in Seoul had been gifted by the Berlin State Senate in 2005 to stand as a memorial and as a sign of hope for the future reunification of the divided Korean peninsula. November 9 2019 marked the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall (or more precisely, the lifting of restrictions on movement between the east and west). This anniversary had me thinking a bit about a developing interest of mine - the archaeology of the...