Conflict and conflict resolution are some of society's most enduring challenges. From interpersonal violence between individuals to intertribal warfare and large-scale pitched battles, conflict transcends space and time. Furthermore, its consequences can be traced in migration histories, genetic legacies, and in the structure (and inequalities) of contemporary society. In this way, conflict not only manifests as a destructive force but has been central to the construction of social identities (see Ch. 9, by Pérez Rubio) and in the creation of many modern nation states. It is this that makes its study particularly important and increasingly relevant, in understanding how and why conflict arises, its immediate and lasting impacts, and how we might use our insights from the past to make better societies today and in the future.
Conflict archaeology is now a well-established field, cemented perhaps by the launch of the Journal of Conflict Archaeology in 2005. The increased use of geophysical and metal-detector surveys, together with the rise of Forensic Archaeology, has allowed not only for the augmentation of historical narratives with the individual stories (and horrors) of war, but has enabled the identification and repatriation of victims and the prosecution of perpetrators of war crimes.
The rejection of outmoded stereotypes such as Rousseau's concept of the ‘noble savage’, have, however, led prehistorians to shy away from the study of conflict. This ‘pacification of the past’ was a reaction against the narratives of early explorers and ethnographers, who fetishized the more violent aspects of indigenous peoples. Coupled with a focus on the more symbolic aspects of the archaeological record, conflict was virtually written out of prehistory, and (as the editors’ note in Chapter 1) even studies of Roman conquest—for which Caesar's De Bello Gallico represents perhaps the most overt evidence for prolonged conflict—tended to focus on the Pax Romana and processes of Romanization. A number of scholars have sought to redress this balance (e.g. Armit, Reference Armit2007; Keeley, Reference Keeley1996) and reintroduce the study of prehistoric conflict into mainstream narratives (see, for example, Fagan et al., Reference Fagan, Fibiger, Hudson and Trundle2020); in the present volume, see Horn's re-examination of Early Bronze Age weaponry from southern Scandinavia (Ch. 5) and Jiménez et al.'s study of the complex, reciprocal relationship between violence/power/‘Roman’/native in the Late Republic conquest landscape around Numantia, Spain (Ch. 11). Increasing recognition is now being given to the contextually-specific nature of interpersonal violence and the highly ritualised nature of much of this activity; indeed, the difficulty of separating ‘pragmatic’ from symbolic in the study of conflict is only too clear in O'Brien et al.'s discussion of the destruction of Irish hillforts (Ch. 7) and in Blankenfeldt and Carnap-Bornheim's discussion of the large assemblages of ‘ritually-sacrificed’ military equipment at Thorsberger Moor in northern Germany (Ch. 19).
It is against this background that we must consider the present volume, which is the product of a 2015 conference (The Materiality of Conflict: Aims, Methods and Theory of Conflict Archaeology from Prehistory to Modern Times) held in Amsterdam and a conference session (Battlefield Archaeology: Exploring the Materialities of Conflict) held at the European Association of Archaeologists annual meeting in Glasgow, with additional invited contributions. The editors rightly acknowledge that the methodological and theoretical framework of conflict archaeology is underdeveloped in prehistoric and protohistoric studies (Ch. 1) and, as such, the volume marks a departure for prehistoric studies of conflict in its focus on collective rather than smaller-scale interpersonal violence. Indeed, there is a distinctive (and explicable) divide between the types of conflict traditionally studied in the prehistoric and historic periods, with the archaeological record much better suited to investigations of, for example, traumatic injuries on individual human bones than the larger-scale (but chronologically more tightly-constrained) events represented by documentary sources and historic battlefields.
Following introductory Chapter 1, the volume is arranged in four parts proceeding in broadly chronological fashion from the Neolithic (Part One), through the Bronze and Iron Ages (Part Two), to mass violence as the result of imperial expansion by Rome in Iberia (Part Three) and Gaul and Germania (Part Four). The papers represent the product of both new excavation and survey—such as the Bronze Age massacre site of Tollense in northern Germany (Lidke et al., Ch. 6)—and the reanalysis of previously known sites—such as the sanctuary at Ribemont-sur-Ancre (Brunaux, Ch. 8) and the oppidum at Alesia (Reddé, Ch. 16) in France—within new interpretative frameworks. Through this, the volume aims not only to pull together the current state of research in the field but also ‘to contribute to the development of methodological and theoretical approaches to the study of past conflict’ (p. xiii).
As the editors point out (p. 5), a general lack of chronological resolution has skewed the study of prehistoric collective violence towards post-conflict ritual activities and, as Fibiger (Ch. 2) notes, any straightforward interpretation of Neolithic mass fatality sites such as Talheim and Herxheim (Germany) needs also to consider the more complex associated activities witnessed at sites which show evidence for additional peri-mortem injuries indicative of torture or mutilation (Shöneck-Kilianstädten), the careful arrangement of bodies in graves (Eulau), and complex post-mortem processing of the dead (Bergheim). The spectacular evidence from the Danish site of Alken Enge (Holst et al., Reference Holst, Heinemeier, Hertz, Jensen, Løvscahl and Mollerup2018) is one such example, but the same challenges can be seen in Szeverényi and Kiss’ discussion of the skeletal evidence from Bronze Age Hungary (Ch. 4).
Moreover, evidence for large-scale conflict is often ephemeral (not least because of the wide areas over which it took place), especially in periods pre-dating the routine use of metals, while the short timescales—described by the editors as ‘micro-time’ (p. 5)—over which ‘battle events’ likely took place are not well-served by traditional site-based archaeological methods. New, bespoke, interdisciplinary approaches are required. The editors outline thirteen such approaches (pp. 3–5), which are illustrated in the various contributions, from large-scale survey and remote sensing to landscape reconstruction, the study of military installations, use-wear analysis of weaponry and forensic analysis of human remains, to mobility and population-scale studies, computer and agent-based modelling and, finally (where appropriate) the use of textual sources. Through these strategies, archaeology has not only the ability to shed light on conflicts which feature less prominently in the historical record—as the work of Fernández-Götz et al. (Ch. 12) and Costa-García (Ch. 13) on the Augustan conquest of northern Spain demonstrate—but also has much to offer in the study of even well-documented conflict landscapes, in augmenting and challenging existing narratives through consideration of ‘the material traces of domination, resistance, and violence’ which reach far beyond specific battles and campaigns (Jiménez et al., Ch. 11, p. 116).
The editors propose an historical-anthropological framework (p. 8) which considers time/space, cultural, and institutional dimensions of conflict at the short-term, medium-term, and long-term scale (i.e. from the excavation of individual sites to the broader macro-regional social and temporal context). Though the framework is usefully summarised in Figure 1.3, it may have been useful to include a worked example to demonstrate how the theoretical model could be implemented. Indeed, clearer definition of terms of reference—for example, how the editors define ‘collective violence’ as opposed to interpersonal violence—would have been useful, as Meyer (Ch. 18) does for ‘battle’ and ‘combat’ (pp. 206–07) in his discussion of the evidence from Kalkriese and Harzhorn in Germany.
The volume contains a combination of thematic overviews and case studies which are both wide-ranging (from Iberia to Scandinavia) in geographical extent and which examine the archaeology of conflict from the Neolithic to Late Antiquity. The thirteenth century bc evidence from Tollense in north-east Germany (Lidke et al., Ch. 6), with the skeletal remains of around 130 individuals along a 2.5-kilometre stretch of the valley, represents perhaps the most overt evidence for truly prehistoric ‘collective violence’, though depictions of battles, ambushes, execution squads, hand-to-hand fighting, and wounded archers in Spanish Levantine rock art (López-Montalvo, Ch. 3) demonstrate that collective violence was present elsewhere. As Fibiger (Ch. 2) rightly notes in her synthesis of skeletal material from central-northern Europe, however, distinct patterns of violence are often hard to elucidate and, more often than not, the evidence (at least in a Neolithic context) points to ‘the regional and temporal complexity of violent interaction’ (p. 17). Indeed, some of the more successful considerations of collective violence come, perhaps unsurprisingly, from studies for which some supporting documentary evidence survives, notably in the Roman conquest of Iberia, Gaul, and Germania. This only serves to remind us of the difficulty of identifying short-lived, large-scale battlefield landscapes in non-literate societies.
The pitfalls of using written sources to frame archaeological inquiry, especially those generated from an ethnocentric perspective, are well-documented (see Jehne, Reference Jehne and Raaflaub2017 and Jervis, Reference Jervis and Raaflaub2017 for useful discussions of Caesar's De Bello Gallico). The papers in Parts Three and Four of this volume demonstrate, however, that when used sensitively with other strands of evidence, these sources can augment archaeological interpretations, including the identification of specific monuments and landscapes as conflict sites: see, for example, Bellón Ruiz et al.'s investigation of the Battle of Baecula in Iberia (Ch. 10), the results of Deyber and Luginbühl's extensive fieldwork on the military landscape of the Battle of Arausio in southern France (Ch. 14), and Roymans’ discussion of the evidence from the Kessel/Lith area of the River Meuse in the Netherlands (Ch. 15). Several papers use historical narratives in other innovative ways: Hornung (Ch. 17), for example, combines Caesar's commentary on his campaign across Gaul with typological and geochemical analysis of quernstones to identify the Roman military camp at Hermeskeil as belonging to Labienus’ campaign of 51 bc, while Meyer (Ch. 18) uses the location of conflict sites as documented in the written sources to reconstruct the likely course of ancient routeways for which no physical evidence exists.
The volume is successful in bringing together a formidable collection of studies on some of the most iconic prehistoric conflict sites across Europe, with cutting-edge research and ground-breaking approaches. At the same time, however, in its lean towards proto-history, it demonstrates the challenges prehistorians continue to face in identifying the large-scale, short-lived events associated with collective violence. In this regard, and with such wide-ranging papers, a concluding chapter may have been beneficial in bringing the rich data from the various studies together (perhaps within the historical-anthropological framework outlined in Chapter 1) and in setting an agenda for the examination of prehistoric collective violence going forward. Nevertheless, this volume represents an important contribution to the increasing number of publications on prehistoric interpersonal violence and forms a strong foundation for future research.
