Invisible Battlefields and Archaeological Research on War

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Theorizing Warfare: Global Perspectives on Defense and Fortification" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Discussions of the deep history of social violence depend on archaeological evidence, evidence that is subject to the same issues of bias and preservation as other archaeological evidence: organics decay and archaeologists work where we can see objects. Warfare research in archaeology depends particularly on bioarchaeological evidence of violent death and the presence and design of community fortifications. History and ethnography, though, document the importance of combat in the open—on battlefields—and Douglas Scott and other battlefield archaeologists show that the archaeology of battlefields offers important information on the scale and organization of conflict. This can tell us, in turn, about the scale and organization of the societies engaged in that conflict. However, battlefields, particularly ancient battlefields, rarely yield human remains or concentrations of artifacts; they are effectively invisible to us. I argue here that this means that our accounts of the deep history of war are systematically biased and incomplete and are particularly likely to misrepresent social aspects of inter-group conflict.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Theorizing Warfare: Global Perspectives on Defense and Fortification

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50753