“We Go to Gain a Little Patch of Ground. That hath in it no profit but the name”: Revolutionary Research in Archaeologies of Conflict

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "“We Go to Gain a Little Patch of Ground. That hath in it no profit but the name”: Revolutionary Research in Archaeologies of Conflict," at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Since the seminal work of Scott et al. at Little Bighorn, conflict archaeology has exploded with practitioners and offerings. Conflict Archaeology is a broad subdiscipline that encompasses archaeologies of memorialization, battlefields, aviation, defense; confinement and internment, holocaust archaeologies, class conflict and symbolic violence. The subdiscipline is an archaeology of the violence that runs as a dark current through the themes of historical archaeology itself.

However, perceptions exist that conflict archaeology is synonymous with battlefield archaeology, rather than subsuming it, and that conflict archaeology in general is disconnected from anthropological approaches to the past and lacking in theoretical and methodological grounding. This symposium aims to gain a little patch of ground against these views by showcasing the rise of theoretically informed, anthropologically driven research across an array of time periods and focuses. Much of this is the work of early career researchers; this symposium provides a platform for these diverse scholars.