ABSTRACT
It is an unfortunate fact that warfare characterises the modern world. Yet archaeological evidence shows that warfare is not a new phenomenon, with suggestions that it existed at least from the Mesolithic period (e.g. Thorpe, 2003; Boehm, 2012), as hunting and gathering gave way to farming and more settled lifeways, involving larger communities and arguably more reliance upon territories and ownership. What is distinctive about warfare in the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries, however, is the scale and the intensity of conflict, the degree to which its influence reaches deep into society, and the extent of its close relationship with developments in industry and technology. But there is also common ground. Like earlier examples, these more recent conflicts leave significant trace, in the form of both matériel and other physical legacies such as sites and buildings spread across landscapes, as well as the more mundane objects which people associate with the personal experiences of a conflict, and which reside now in personal and museum collections. And just as with earlier remains, the study of these modern sites and objects can benefit from an archaeological approach. It is that approach that we address in this chapter, focusing not so much on the evidence and what it tells us (described in numerous other publications, such as Dobinson et al., 1997; Schofield et al., 2002; Cocroft and Thomas, 2003; Schofield, 2005, 2009; Schofield and Cocroft, 2007), but on the archaeological methods and approaches that can be used to document the sites and buildings that remain as physical traces of recent warfare, and how to interpret them (for which see also Schofield et al., 2006).
