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169 Abstract The emergence of the European Union has led to European states no longer making war on each other. The long history of war in Europe, however, has had an inevitable impact upon European identities: from the emergence of city-states in Greece and Italy, through the rise of Athenian, Alexandrian, and Roman Empires, to medieval feudalism and the modern nation-state. However, the new peace that prevails has meant that in formulating a new sense of pan-European identity, past wars are treated as matters best left untouched lest they revive old hostilities. The emergence of Conflict Archaeology as a subdiscipline has also meant, however, a renewed interest among archaeologists in Europe in past conflict. Drawing upon the aims and objectives of the newly established ESTOC group, this paper develops an approach to the archaeological study of conflict in Europe’s past that can contribute to the creation of a sense of identity in Europe that owes nothing to supra-nationalism, but meets the conditions of the era of pan-European concord. At the heart of this work lies the recognition that war creates as well as destroys: and it is by focusing upon the new things that conflict makes that its study can play a part in constructing new senses of identity. Introduction Warfare has played a significant role in the historical development of Europe: it has helped shape and disperse European political forms, such as the nation-state; it has decided the borders of polities that survive today; it has frequently provided the context within which scientific and technological advances were made; and it determined longlasting patterns of enmity and friendship that went across national and other boundaries. Chapter Nine Past War and European Identity Making Conflict Archaeology Useful John Carman 170 The Politics and Identities of Violence To deny the importance of past warfare in Europe is inevitably to deny us access to an important part of that past. Nevertheless, there is a tendency to do that when it comes to setting out research agendas at the European level. This is understandable, since war is essentially a process that divides people from one another, and we live in an era where we prefer to emphasize the similarities of peoples rather than their differences. This paper outlines an initiative to overcome this difficulty. Conflict Archaeology The study of past conflict as a distinct strand of archaeological research has a very short history—less than ten years in Europe; less than 20 years in the UK; and no more than 30 years in the United States. Although the archaeological study of individual conflict sites can claim to be part of quite a long tradition—with the earliest work dating from either the late seventeenth century or the 1840s (depending on how you judge these things) (Foard 2008), the 1960s (do Paço 1963), and into the 1970s (Newman 1981)—the real breakthrough came with work at the Little Bighorn site in the United States in the mid-1980s, where the specific technique of using metal detectors to locate battlefield archaeology was developed (Scott et al. 1989). Although the Little Bighorn work was the inspiration to a new generation of scholars to start looking especially at historic battle sites, Conflict Archaeology coalesced as a distinct field only with the first international conference dedicated to the topic in Glasgow in 2000 (Freeman and Pollard 2001), and which has now grown into the leading conference series Fields of Conflict, which have been held since in Finland, the United States (Scott et al. 2007), again in the UK, in Belgium, in Germany, and most recently in Hungary. The establishment of the Journal of Conflict Archaeology in 2005 (another Glasgow initiative; Pollard and Banks 2006) marked the full emergence of Conflict Archaeology as a legitimate area of specialization. However, the field also has a wider set of origins. In the 1990s and into the early 2000s, numbers of prehistoric archaeologists in the United States, the UK, and Scandinavia developed simultaneously and largely independently a revived interest in the origins and form of conflict in societies without writing and state organization (Arkush and Allen 2006; Carman 1997b; Haas 1990; Keeley 1996; Otto et al. 2006). At the same time, others— mostly in the UK—recognized the impending loss of the material evidence of twentiethcentury warfare (especially World Wars I and II), and concerted efforts were put into place to record what remained, to find ways of conserving what was important, and of studying...

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