In Artifactual, Elizabeth Anne Davis explores how Cypriot researchers, scientists, activists, and artists process and reckon with civil and state violence that led to the enduring division of the island, using forensic and documentary materials to retell and recontextualize conflicts between and within the Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot communities. Davis follows forensic archaeologists and anthropologists who attempt to locate, identify, and return to relatives the remains of Cypriots killed in those conflicts. She turns to filmmakers who use archival photographs and footage to come to terms with political violence and its legacies. In both forensic science and documentary filmmaking, the dynamics of secrecy and revelation shape how material remains such as bones and archival images are given meaning. Throughout, Davis demonstrates how Cypriots navigate the tension between an ethics of knowledge, which valorizes truth as a prerequisite for recovery and reconciliation, and the politics of knowledge, which renders evidence as irremediably partial and perpetually falsifiable.

Elizabeth Anne Davis is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University and author of Bad Souls: Madness and Responsibility in Modern Greece, also published by Duke University Press.

Acknowledgments  xiii
Prologue. Nobody Knows a Thing  xix
Introduction. Artifactual  1
1. Forensic  45
2. Documentary  173
Epilogue. Our Own Ghosts  287
Appendix. Archive  299
Notes  305
Filmography  337
References  339
Index  353