Weaponised Pasts

Weaponised Pasts is an interdisciplinary, Leverhulme-funded project examining the evolution of heritage-based hostility online and in the lab, led by Dr Chiara Bonacchi.

Background

Interpretations of the human past are routinely weaponised online to frame others as enemies. Such hostility can undermine democratic discourse, cause distress, and translate into violence offline. This is one of the most challenging and unresolved problems within public archaeology, heritage and identity studies today.

Logo for the project consisting of the words weaponised pasts and a speech bubble

Discoveries about the human past offer an appealing subject for news coverage and its dissemination in social media environments. On social media, users can modify and repost information about archaeological news, pushing it toward new cultural and social meanings. Some of these meanings generate hostility. A recent example is the response to ground-breaking research on the DNA of Cheddar Man, an individual who died about 10,000 years ago in England and who, in 2018, was found to have dark to black skin pigmentation, blue eyes and dark hair. Several media outlets described Cheddar Man as ‘the first Brit’ and news about the discovery was leveraged online to uphold racist and antisemitic views. This was far from being a short-lived episode, with similar interpretations of Cheddar Man reappearing in social media posts discussing the 2024 UK riots. 

What led to the emergence and spread of this heritage-based hostility? What was the role played by content features such as the heritage themes, or the language chosen? What was the impact of the communication context, and of social media users’ values? At present, we do not have answers to these questions.

Without establishing how such heritage-based hostile narratives spread, and why some may be pervasive on social media, it has not been possible to determine ways of curtailing this phenomenon.

Weaponised Pasts website

Our investigation will develop a theoretical framework to study the weaponisation of the past, and establish its causal mechanisms, by answering the following questions:

  1. What features of heritage content and language are more strongly associated with hostility on social media?
  2. How do content-focused factors interact with context-related aspects of the communication and the values of social media users to predict the emergence, transformation and spread of hostile narratives?
  3. What kinds of hostile narratives result from the evolution of communications about heritage on social media, who do they antagonise and how can they be prevented?

The team will answer these questions through a novel approach – the first to combine public archaeology, cultural evolution and cognitive psychology. Our methodology involves two complementary strands that will analyse real-world and experimental data about the dissemination of archaeological discoveries published in newspapers and shared on social media.

In Strand A we will examine UK-based newspaper articles and tweets that discuss recent archaeological discoveries to examine the content- and context-related features that lead to the emergence of hostility. In Strand B we will experimentally manipulate those content- and context- related features to examine how individual differences (e.g., demographics and values) affect the spread of heritage narratives between participants.


Weaponised Pasts will tackle the long-standing research problem of heritage-based hostility.

The team will produce a theoretical framework, several peer-reviewed research articles, a monograph, and a white paper. These outputs will cohere to provide heritage communicators with guidance about themes, language, and target audiences that can be avoided or favoured when writing press releases, articles and other texts to disseminate archaeological findings. These recommendations will help to curtail the diffusion of hostility on social media, providing clear and tangible benefits for wider society.

Weaponised Pasts represents a collaboration between the Departments of Archaeology and Psychology at the University of Edinburgh, and the Department of Sociology and Social Research at the University of Trento. Our team comprises:


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