Warfare, Violence, and Conflict (Other Keyword)
26-50 (84 Records)
This is an abstract from the "New Perspectives on Ritual Violence and Related Human Body Treatments in Ancient Mesoamerica" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ritual use and display of skulls, digits, and femurs is well documented in Mesoamerica. But except for the heart, few sources describe how organs and soft body tissues were curated during the brief time they could been have been viable for manipulation or display. Nevertheless, there is rich...
Displacement and Burials in Wartime Acholiland; Archaeological Surveying and Ethnographic Research in Northern Uganda (2018)
A multi-subfield anthropological research team from the University of Tennessee Knoxville has been conducting fieldwork in Acholiland since 2014 in order to analyze how improper burials are affecting the cultural and geospatial reality of post-war Northern Uganda. The project has primarily involved ethnographic research; however, archaeological surveying was introduced in 2016 for the purpose of locating and documenting wartime burials. The concerned burials are related to the 1987 to 2006 war...
Documenting the First Battle of the Spanish-Cuban-American War (1898): Insights for an Archaeological Perspective (2018)
The Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898 constituted not only the events leading to the start of the first modern war but also marked the beginning of the colonialist expansion of the United States throughout the world. The explosion of the USS Maine in Havana’s harbor has often been interpreted as the excuse used by the US to get involved in the Cuban War of Independence; a war that Cubans and Spaniards had been fighting since 1895, but rooted since 1868. Previous research has traditionally...
Enemies and Allies: GIS Analyses of Late Intermediate Period Defensibility and Settlement Patterns in the Huamanga Province of Peru* (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Warfare theorists argue that scholars must move beyond social evolutionary theories and realize that warfare and sociopolitical organization are not autonomous and self-regulating; one cannot be understood in isolation from the other. Instead, scholars need to focus on the interrelationships between and interdependency of military infrastructure and societal...
An Experimental Approach to Fracture Variation Attributed to Weapon Morphology Using Replica Chankan Maces (2018)
The use of stone weapons is prevalent throughout the history of the Chanka (C.E. 1050-1400), a civilization that inhabited the Apurímac region in Peru and once rivaled the great Incan Empire. Accordingly, the impact fractures such weapons create provide direct evidence to deciphering the deaths of these Andean warriors and their violent past. This project seeks to provide experimental evidence of fracture variation attributed to differences in weapon morphology, which can be compared to the...
Fear Written Large: Systematic Warfare and the Ancient Empire of Urartu (2018)
This paper presents a Landscapes of Warfare case study, combining textual documentation, archeological data and GIS analysis to elucidate the effects of pervasive warfare on the development of Urartu, a highland empire that existed in the ancient Near East in the 1st Millennium BCE. Specifically, I argue that forts, fortresses and fortified settlements were strategically placed for both defensive communication as well as the systematic surveillance of roads. The paper contributes to scholarly...
Female Warriors of the Viking Age (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Women of Violence: Warriors, Aggressors, and Perpetrators of Violence" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In my presentation I will explore how women in the Viking age contributed to acts of violence by looking into three different cases of burials containing women with weapons and armaments. I will draw these studies from my original Master’s thesis published in 2017 and focus solely on the archaeological evidence,...
First Contact, Pueblo Resistance, and Multiethnic Conflict on the Vázquez de Coronado Expedition of 1540–1542 (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The immense expedition into the American Southwest led by Francisco Vázquez de Coronado from 1540 to 1542 was the first contact from outsiders experienced by many indigenous groups of the region. Coronado's entourage included Europeans from several countries, North Africans, Blacks, and Native soldiers from numerous Mexican ethnic groups. Well over 2,500...
Forensic Archaeology Fieldwork as a High-Impact Practice (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Applying the Power of Partnerships to the Search for America's Missing in Action" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation will discuss search and recovery efforts concerning an isolated, World War II-era burial from the Federal Republic of Germany. This was a project partnership between the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) and Western Carolina University (WCU), coordinated between DPAA, WCU, and...
Gardening for Victory: War Gardens in the Ancient Andes (2018)
During times of social and political crisis humans’ most basic biological needs still need to be met: they need to eat. This means that during times of war, when state infrastructure breaks down and supply chains are threatened, people often take food security matters into their own hands. During 20th century conflicts, families ensured food security on the home front by building household gardens. Practically, the construction of war gardens resulted in decreased individual reliance on often...
Gendered Trouble: Reconsidering the Role of Females in the Masculinized Spaces of Violence in an Early Bronze Age Population (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Women of Violence: Warriors, Aggressors, and Perpetrators of Violence" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mierzanowice Culture (~2400–1600 BCE) communities in the Central European Early Bronze Age buried their dead in a formalized and gendered manner, in which males and females typically assumed mirror-opposite orientations in their respective graves. Furthermore, the archetypal "warrior" grave—whether simply an...
Getting the Job Done: Case Resolution in the Field, from Investigation through Recovery, at Site GM-05585, a Low-Angle B-17G Crash Site in Sachsen Anhalt, Germany. (2019)
This is an abstract from the "A Multidimensional Mission: Crossing Conflicts, Synthesizing Sites, and Adapting Approaches to Find Missing Personnel" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The DPAA case resolution process involves a number of important steps that occur before a recovery team is sent into the field to excavate an incident site, and typically includes a combination of historic research, witness interviews, field investigations, and...
Hitting Huggins’ Roadblock: Confronting the Challenge of Recovering the Missing from a World War II Battlefield in Oro Province, Papua New Guinea (2019)
This is an abstract from the "A Multidimensional Mission: Crossing Conflicts, Synthesizing Sites, and Adapting Approaches to Find Missing Personnel" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The complexity of accounting for missing in action personnel is highly dependent on the past—and present—context of the loss. In late 1942, during the Battle of Buna-Gona in New Guinea, United States forces established a roadblock behind forward Japanese positions in an...
Human Sacrifice and Body Processing in Late Eastern Mesoamerica: New Evidence from Toniná, Lagartero, and Champotón (2021)
This is an abstract from the "New Perspectives on Ritual Violence and Related Human Body Treatments in Ancient Mesoamerica" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A number of non-reverential, highly processed human assemblages containing mutilated sternal bones have been documented in different parts of Postclassic period Mesoamerica and beyond after being described by Carmen Pijoan in a massive ritual deposit from Tlatelolco, in the Aztec capital. In...
"Inconceivable!": Innovation and Improvisation on a WWII-Era Aircraft Crash Site in the Swamps of Papua New Guinea (2019)
This is an abstract from the "A Multidimensional Mission: Crossing Conflicts, Synthesizing Sites, and Adapting Approaches to Find Missing Personnel" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological recovery of an aircraft crash site differs significantly from traditional archaeology in that the former often takes place in locations unsuitable for human habitation, in geographic and environmental settings beyond the scope of standard excavation...
Initial Results from Magnetometer Survey at the Sacred Site of Dakajalan, Mali (2018)
In the spring of 2017 geophysical remote sensing surveys were conducted across three locations at and around the Dakajalan sacred site, Commune Rurale de Sanankoroba, Mali in order to detect anomalies associated with archaeological features. This site has been described in oral tradition as the location where the battle that proceeded the formation of the Mali Empire took place, and also where the village that acted as the first capital of the newly formed empire was located. Surface survey of...
The Intersection of Multiple Conflicts: The Excavation of an F-4C Crash Site in the Midst of the Dien Bien Phu Battlefield (2019)
This is an abstract from the "A Multidimensional Mission: Crossing Conflicts, Synthesizing Sites, and Adapting Approaches to Find Missing Personnel" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Between 2014 and 2017, archaeologists with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) excavated an active rice paddy in northwest Vietnam in search of two missing U.S. service members from the Vietnam War. The incident aircraft, an F-4C, was shot down on March 15,...
The Invisibility of Violent Women (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Women of Violence: Warriors, Aggressors, and Perpetrators of Violence" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We are all capable of violence. Violence utilized by men is rarely—if ever—questioned, but for women it is presumed a tool employed only by exception. Individuals and groups of both sexes have used violence to many ends. Though sex may influence the context and mode of employment, the capacity for violence is...
An Isotopic Assessment of Late Prehistoric Interregional Warfare in the Southcentral US (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There is a great need to develop better methods to identify and quantify warfare when it occurs without accompanying written documentation, and to consider alternative explanations of data. This study tests if late-prehistoric Caddo communities in southwest Arkansas were committing large-scale acts of violence against neighboring regions. Concurrent...
Kept Out or Closed In? An Analysis of Civilian Fortification Strategies during the Maya Social War (2018)
In this paper, I explore the ways in which albarradas, or the dry-laid enclosure walls ubiquitous to Yucatec Maya towns, can be manipulated to become defensive structures under the threat of attack. I discuss the results of a recent study that conducted a construction analysis on a series of wall features in the now unpopulated town of Tela – an auxiliary to and key commercial throughway for the burgeoning frontier hub of Tihosuco (since repopulated) during the 19th century. This town was...
Land Use, Settlement Patterns, and Collective Defense in the Titicaca Basin: The Constitution of Defensive Community (2018)
This paper starts from the hypothesis that "community" in the Andean highlands in the Late Intermediate Period (LIP) had a great deal to do, not only with kinship and territory, but also with collective defense, including the defense of important common resources. If so, how would the socioeconomic activities of farming and herding have affected the practical organization of defense, and the formation of communities based in part on common defense? I draw on the archaeological record of the...
Late Woodland Cultural Adaptations in the Lower Missouri River Valley: Archery, Warfare, and the Rise of Complexity (2018)
The introduction of the bow and arrow into prehistoric Missouri during the Late Woodland Period possibly changed the Middle Woodland social dynamic and settlement pattern arrangement such that there was a major increase in social cooperation between settlements tied closely to defensive settlement strategies. Small villages faced the possibility of effective, long-range attacks that could potentially lead to the quick application of overwhelming force on unprepared villages. To address this...
Marine Archaeology’s Influence on Interpretations of Early Modern Warfare, 1975–2020 (2018)
Each succeeding generation of historians discovers and taps new types of evidence, prompting reconceptualization of what constitutes "history" and spawning new fields of study. Marine archaeology (and the overlapping fields of maritime archaeology and conflict archaeology) are instrumental not only in recovering new primary materials, but also in reconstructing historical interpretation and historical debates. To cite a solitary example, the teaming of marine archaeologist Colin Martin and...
New Perspectives on Warfare in the Iron Age of Wessex (2018)
Wessex, a region of southern England, has been the subject of more study than almost any other region of the UK. While much excavation has focused on the Iron Age little work has focused on the role of warfare at that time. Discussions of warfare have led to antithetical conclusions by researchers utilizing the same material with much of the disagreement stemming from fundamentally different interpretations of equivocal evidence and assumptions about life in the period. Some of this is...
Often the Victims, Occasionally the Aggressors: The Role of Women in Warfare and Raiding in the Ancestral Pueblo World (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Women of Violence: Warriors, Aggressors, and Perpetrators of Violence" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Discussions about warfare in the pre-contact Southwest tend to focus on lethal interactions between male combatants or the capture of women during raids; much of our own research has focused on the latter. What is overlooked most of the time, however, is the roles that women played in hostile encounters in the region,...