Conflict, today, includes many peoples, in many places, using many practices. From the Middle East to Africa to the Ukraine and the streets of the United States, people fight. People die in the name of ideologies, ethnicities, rights, or ancient animosities born of logics now longpassed. We kill each other using conventional warfare, irregular warfare, terrorism, and other forms of violence, both state-sanctioned and illegitimate. Why people fight, what they do during times of warfare and conflict, and what long-term impacts those conflictshave are all questions of interest to archeologists working in a specialization known as “conflict archeology.”
Aerial photo of bomb craters in Laos from the United States’ Dirty War or Secret War in Laos.
I presume that, for most people, “conflict archeology” evokes images of work on military sites. This is a good starting place, and in fact, one of the first terms proposed for this specialization was “military sites archeology.” In this vein, conflict archeologists do work on sites like battlefields, military camp sites, fortifications, military prisons (including POW camps), and training facilities. These sites come from thousands of years of conflict, everything from ancient Greece to the Global War on Terrorism.
Yet, conflict archeology is so much more. The above examples focus on conflict between or within modern states, usually involving formally established military or paramilitary organizations. We also research situations where you don’t have states and established militaries, where the warriors involved in the fighting were also the farmers, weavers, hunters, potters, and storytellers. Some of these situations are recent, though many are found deeper into history, and our research tells us about how people lived and died centuries ago.
We also go beyond the battlefield. It is a myth that, during times of war, there are distinct military and civilian worlds. War militarizes the civilian landscape as noncombatants are drawn into producing for the war, rearranging labor to produce for the homefront, and to both provide and care for the people who go off to fight and the families that get left behind. Those activities can start much earlier and last much later than the time defined by declarations of war and treaties of peace.
When we take that stance, we in the United States are not as blessed with periods of peace as popular rhetoric would suggest. Though we can point to various wars of the twentieth century as isolated incidents, the birth of the military-industrial complex during World War I and its rapid growth after World War II are a fact of our history and culture. Conflict archeologists have done research on abandoned munitions plants, on farmsteads forcibly abandoned for the creation of military installations, and the creation and layout of detainment centers built to house people (foreign and domestic) considered a threat by state and national governments.
As the Cold War recedes into the past, the traces of that period remain important for both present national defense and understanding our present condition. Conflict archeologists study ballistic missile silos, primed for doomsday since the first launches in the 1950s. Alongside these, conflict archeologists in the UK study sites of anti-nuclear protests, as the discussions and debates around the proliferation of these technologies are a window onto many issues confronting us today.
What happens during conflicts is endlessly fascinating. But how people remember those conflicts, the stories they tell about them, and the things they try to do using those stories are also significant. Here, in the United States, we have seen in the past half-decade numerous public debates and protests about the meaning of past conflict, particularly the American Civil War, and how we mark and interpret the past. Conflict archeologists do pay attention to the importance of how people remember past conflicts as well as study the conflicts themselves. Often, what people find important in the past has more to do with their place in the present, and it is important to remember that some wars are fought in hearts and heads long after the guns fall silent.
“Archeology is…” Series Information
In this series we plan to highlight the many and various things that Are Archeology, from Art to Zoology and everything in between. We hope you enjoy learning a bit more about the variety of things that archeologists do and specialize in and maybe it will inspire you to be an archeologist even if you love learning about things in another field. You can find all the entries here.
