The new interdisciplinary study of modern conflict archaeology has developed rapidly over the last decade. Its anthropological approach to modern conflicts, their material culture and their legacies has freed such investigations from the straitjacket of traditional 'battlefield archaeology'. It offers powerful new methodologies and theoretical insights into the nature and experience of industrialised war, whether between nation states or as civil conflict, by individuals as well as groups and by women and children, as well as men of fighting age. The complexities of studying wars within living memory demand a new response - a sensitised, cross-disciplinary approach which draws on many other kinds of academic study but which does not privilege any particular discipline. It is the most democratic kind of archaeology - one which takes a bottom-up approach - in order to understand the web of emotional, military, political, economic and cultural experiences and legacies of conflict. These 18 papers offer a coherent demonstration of what modern conflict archaeology is and what it is capable of and offers an intellectual home for those not interested in traditional 'war studies' or military history, but who respond to the idea of a multidisciplinary approach to all modern conflict.

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction: Engaging the materialities of twentieth and twenty-first century conflict
• Acknowledgements
• 1. ‘Dead Man’s Penny’: a biography of the First World War bronze memorial plaque
• 2. The Poppy and the Harp: contested meanings at ‘The Oratory’, Dun Laoghaire, Ireland
• 3. The Bare Bones: body parts, bones, and conflict behaviour
• 4. The Diary of an American ‘Doughboy’: interpreting a textual artefact of the First World War
• 5. Picturing War: an intimate memorial to a lost soldier of the First World War
• 6. The Battlefield in Miniature, or the multi-locational town of Messines
• 7. Remembering the ‘Doughboys’: American memorials of the Great War
• 8. ‘Lone and Captive Far From Home’: gendered objects in Boer POWOW camps, Bermuda, 1901–2
• 9. Mr Hopgood’s Shed: an archaeology of Bishop’s Cannings wireless station
• 10. ‘Hitler Loves Musso’, and Other Civilian Wartime Sentiments: the archaeology of Second World War air-raid shelters and their graffiti
• 11. The Many Faces of the Chaco War: indigenous modernity and conflict archaeology
• 12. Trees as a Living Museum: arborglyphs and conflict on Salisbury Plain
• 13. Hadrian and the Hejaz Railway: linear features in conflict landscapes
• 14. Churchill’s ‘Silent Sentinels’: an archaeological spatial evaluation of Britain’s Second World War coastal defences at Weymouth, Dorset, c. 1940
• 15. Landmark, Symbol, and Monument: public perceptions of a Cold War early warning site in Germany
• 16. A America’s Nuclear Wasteland: conflict landscape, simulation, and ’non-place’ at the Nevada Test Site
• 17. Signs, Signals and Senses: the soldier body in the trenches
• 18. Beneath the Waves: the conflict seascape of the Baltic
• Afterword