Global Perspectives on Landscapes of Warfare adds to ongoing discussions about the nature and scale of warfare in the past by examining the transformation of landscapes as part of defensive and offensive warfare-related strategies. In the introductory chapter, coeditors Hugo C. Ikehara-Tsukayama and Juan Carlos Vargas Ruiz lay out the book's primary aim: to discuss and compare how communities in conflict modified and interacted with landscapes in varied geographic and historical contexts. To facilitate these comparisons, it is organized into two sections, Old World and New World, and readers are invited to compare these regions’ developmental trajectories, environmental contexts, sociopolitical complexity, and different methods and approaches to the study of landscapes. Accompanying each chapter are numerous visual aids, many published in color. Although the book is largely global in scope, the editors acknowledge that some regions are not included but that warfare in those regions has received attention elsewhere.
Two overlapping research themes emerge from the contributions to this book. First, many authors explore the character and use of different kinds of fortification and defensive systems. Drawing on site patterning, topography, and paleoenvironmental data, Igor Chechuskov argues that Late Bronze Age fortifications in the Urals may have protected people and livestock from flooding and steppe winds, rather than serving defensive purposes. James Williams tests three hypotheses about the role of fortified settlements during the Longshan period in China and rejects all three based on his GIS-based analysis of site locations, resource availability, and political boundaries. Instead, Williams claims that fortifications were related to craft specialization, serving to protect the production of specialized objects for exchange and trade. Similarly, Lizzie Scholtus contends that fortified Iron Age and Roman settlements in northeastern France were used for defensive purposes and for controlling access to and protecting the extraction of raw material resources in the region. Tiffany Early-Spadoni draws on viewshed analyses of fire beacon, fort, and road networks from Middle Bronze Age Syria and Iron Age Assyria to understand the movement of military campaigns and strategic communication systems within polities. Using line-of-sight visibility and site-spacing data, Kerry Nichols explores changes in site locations in the lower Missouri River Valley during the Middle and Late Woodland periods, arguing that Late Woodland settlements were more clustered; they allowed for increased mutual defense after the introduction of the bow and arrow. Lauren Kohut develops a model for hypothesizing and assessing alliance building in the Colca Valley of Peru. Her GIS-based alliance modeling considers landscape data (terrain, distance, estimation of travel times, etc.) to approximate threat identification (when a threat becomes visible to people at a site), lead time (the time needed for a threat to reach the site after it becomes visible), and response area (the area around a site in which allied neighbors could send aid for defense).
The second theme questions the historical development and scale of warfare and its association with sociopolitical complexity. Viktor Borzunov demonstrates that Neolithic and Chalcolithic fortifications in the West Siberian taiga were local developments, rather than being built by migrating herding/farming communities from the south and east. Takehiko Matusgi traces changes in fortified settlements, weaponry, and violent trauma during the Yayoi and Kofun periods in Japan, finding decline in warfare over time even while the amount of weaponry in elite burial contexts increased: Matsugi attributes this decline to shifts to collective ideologies as opposed to individualistic ideologies. Nam Kim and Russell Quick discuss Bronze Age fortifications at Co Loa in Vietnam, describing how their construction incorporated unique landscape features and arguing that the city was created as a seat of political power, with its massive fortifications inscribing power relations (locally and extralocally) on the landscape for generations. Juan Carlos Vargas Ruiz begins with ethnohistoric accounts of the Llanos of Colombia, where Europeans described powerful chiefs, fortified settlements, warfare, and captive taking. Vargas Ruiz then turns to the archaeological record of the region to assess the deeper history and transformation of landscapes of violence in the Llanos. Ikehara-Tsukayama documents changing settlement and defensive patterns in the Nepeña Valley of Peru, tying transitions in defensive systems (and who has access to them) to changes in sociopolitical organization and regional politics.
The book concludes with a chapter by Elizabeth Arkush, which should become required reading for archaeologists researching warfare. Arkush adeptly highlights several shortcomings in the book and in the archaeology of warfare more broadly. She argues that archaeologies of warfare are missing robust middle-range theory that connects interpretations about warfare to the realities of the archaeological record and our research methods. An additional shortcoming that she highlights relates to issues of equifinality: there can be multiple reasons to build a wall, so how can archaeologists distinguish between warfare-related reasons and others? Compounding the issue of equifinality are the long periods of time with which researchers work. Without finer chronological resolution (some case studies span hundreds, if not thousands, of years), it is difficult to assess whether sites within landscapes of warfare were occupied contemporaneously or sequentially; this makes it challenging to interpret the outcomes of analyses of lines of sight, site clustering, and buffer zones.
Global Perspectives on Landscapes of Warfare has much to offer scholars of ancient warfare: geographic and temporal diversity, data-driven analyses, copious graphics, and many compelling hypotheses and theories for other researchers to explore. Contributing authors engage in ongoing discussions about the many different kinds of evidence for (or against) the presence of warfare in the past, and they advance knowledge about associations among practices of warfare, sociopolitical complexity, and the consequences of warfare as enacted on multiple scales across past landscapes.
