Memorials and marching: Archaeological insights into segregation in contemporary Northern Ireland

Since the Belfast Agreement was signed in 1998, marking the official end of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, analysis has mainly focused on compromising politicians and the moves towards normalization. Whilst high-level political resolutions are significant, this article argues that there is a need to explore how the more mundane but insidious materializations of societal abnormality have been ignored by politicians, but are meaningful in understanding the post-conflict context. The continuing material presences of segregation in working-class communities, which commonly take the form of ethnic enclaves divided by abandoned interfaces and monumental walls, reveals a longstanding lack of engagement with this repercussion of the Troubles. Of particular interest are evolving commemorative and memorialization practices in Nationalist and Loyalist communities that demonstrate the impact of physical segregation on sustaining singular understandings of the recent past.