Martial Landscapes and Contextualizing the Archaeology of War with a Case Study from Kalymnos, Greece

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.

The Greek island of Kalymnos was an anomaly in a region devastated by the Roman-Caliphate warfare of the initial Middle Ages. Amidst regional depopulation and passive resistance by flight, Kalymnos uniquely displayed active, military resistance, its population renucleating into fortified kastra which remained economically and politically connected with the broader Roman state for centuries.

These facts play out not in formulaically-assessed mortality profiles or inventories of type-such-and-such arrowheads, but in the landscape of Kalymnos itself, from cliffs and ravines to indigenously-designed fortifications. Archaeological interpretations of conflict often cling to analogical rubrics of unambiguous typology, presupposing violence is an aberration. A comparative archaeology of conflict must instead be based in the context of its occurrence, the titular martial landscape: a situational constellation of a given space’s traits and relations which define its effect on conflict.

To demonstrate this concept, Kalymnos’ unconventional sites will be examined through repurposing landscape-archaeological methods such as catchment and viewshed, according to principles of warfare and evidence from preliminary fieldwork. Ultimately, this paper intends to demonstrate that, even lacking popular ‘smoking guns,’ one can develop and test precise hypotheses which define the utmost extremes of cultural activity; as archaeologists, we just need to give war a chance.

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): 50719