Since the mid-1990s, when archaeology and anthropology finally “discovered” war in the prehistoric past, the subject has come to attract the kind of attention that its ravages of humanity warrant. Global Perspectives on Landscapes of Warfare is a welcome addition to this field, one that moves beyond site-specific investigations and economic/ecological explanations to examine how people at war modified material, social, and symbolic landscapes in different historical periods, geographical contexts, and stages of sociopolitical complexity.
The twofold aim, as editors Hugo Ikehara-Tsukayama and Juan Carlos Vargas Ruiz explain in their introductory chapter, is to compare cases and sociopolitical trajectories and to understand how landscapes of war were created, transformed, and served as a legacy for future generations. To advance this ambition, the editors divide the volume into two sections—the Old World (seven chapters) and the New World (four chapters)—reasoning that the social and techno-economic trajectories in these two regions developed independently rather than through cultural transmission, as may have occurred in the Old World.
Several chapters that follow are locally focused, seeking either to establish whether social systems were defended or to document and fathom the intentions and implications behind specific defensive systems. Vargas Ruiz confronts a military puzzle created by the interface of history and archaeology in the Colombian llanos of South America. The early history of the llanos talks of powerful Indigenous chiefdoms, nucleated and fortified villages, palisades, and raiding and pillaging forces. Yet geographic and surface surveys provide little evidence of any defensive measures, a useful caution that military practice may be all but invisible in the archaeological record. Igor Chechuskov makes a converse point: the enclosed settlements and positioning of the Late Bronze Age Sintashta-Petrovka complex east of the Urals may not have been defensive arrangements at all but rather climatic adaptations to protect people and animals from seasonal flooding and bitter steppe winds. Moving to clearly defensive systems, Nam Kim and Russell Quick describe the massive fortifications of Co Loa, capital of a Bronze Age state-level Vietnamese polity on the outskirts of present-day Hanoi, suggesting that their scale emerged to counter military pressures from the north.
Other chapters map out and analyze landscapes of defense at more regional levels. Viktor Borzunov documents shifting fortification patterns in the Western Siberian Taiga from 8000 to 4500 BP, an archaeological record poorly known outside Russian academic literature. Lizzie Scholtus surveys fortified Iron Age and Roman period settlements in the Saint-Dié-des Vosges Basin of northeastern France. She proposes that, although they likely protected local people in unsettled times, their main purpose was probably control of mineral exploitation and trade in the Vosges and the projection of wealth and power. For his part, Takehiko Matsugi examines relationships between political consolidation and the forms and intensity of defensive warfare in the Yayoi and Kofun periods in Japan, finding that declines in warfare intensity and investment in fortifications as consolidation progressed reflected a shift from a collective to a more individualist cultural ethos.
The remaining chapters are distinguished by innovative applications of GIS technology to illuminate landscapes of warfare. James Williams combines GIS and resource databases to investigate differential levels of fortification across Longshan period settlements in central China. After testing and rejecting three previous hypotheses, he concludes that fortifications were primarily erected to protect settlements invested with high densities of trade goods. Ikehara-Tsukayama uses GIS methods to map changes in population distributions, settlement patterns, and fortifications in the Middle Nepeña Valley of Peru during the Salinar and Gallinazo periods, which appear to reflect large-scale transformations in defensive organization in response to changing constellations of military threat.
Three other contributors use GIS tools to map terrain and its implications for intervisibility and defensive cooperation. Noting that change in the past is too often explained in economic and ecological rather than military terms, Tiffany Earley-Spadoni deploys historical data and GIS viewshed tools to demonstrate how military exigencies and strategic-communication imperatives (messaging, espionage, early warning) shaped landscape formation in Middle Bronze Age Syria and Iron Age Assyria, which in turn directed subsequent sociocultural trajectories. Kerry Nichols explains changes in Middle and Late Woodland settlement location and patterning along the Missouri River as a defensive response to the adoption of the bow and arrow. And in an exceptionally valuable contribution, one that opens multiple possibilities for extension and refinement, Lauren Kohut combines intervisibility metrics with warrior-mustering times on the dissected terrain of the Colca Valley in highland Peru to pinpoint clusters of settlements and outposts that would have shared collective interests in forging defensive alliances.
Elizabeth Arkush's concluding chapter synthesizes the book's contributions, locates them in the current landscape of archaeological scholarship on prehistoric defense, surveys the lacunae that remain to be filled, and does the job so comprehensively and succinctly that it is difficult for a book reviewer to add anything that would not be plagiarism. That said, the volume does illustrate a major burden under which the archaeology of war labors. As its title indicates, the volume focuses on “landscapes of warfare,” but its focus on defensive rather than offensive war—the mechanics of attack and engagement—is striking. A few chapters do touch on offensive warfare, but what empirical support they muster is extrapolated from the analysis of defense. And how could things be otherwise? As a dialectic between offense and defense, war demands as much scholarly attention to the former as the latter. But compared to its defensive counterpart, offensive warfare is all but illegible in the material record, surviving as little more than fragments of weaponry and perimortem trauma that are notoriously difficult to interpret.
Absent revolutionary advances in field techniques, archaeology has little option but to deploy ethnographic analogy. But here, too, there are challenges. It is not just, as Arkush poignantly observes, that “the lack of maps and illustrations [in the ethnographic record of war] is enough to make an archaeologist weep” (p. 279). Archaeologists will find themselves shedding more tears because so many early ethnographers, motivated by the best of liberal concerns, avoided the subject. Library shelves groan under the weight of works on kinship and initiation rituals; those on warfare might be missed if one were to blink. Even so, rich ethnographic and historical resources, albeit mostly unpublished, yet remain to be plumbed if scholars are willing to develop the requisite expertise and invest the necessary time.
