Archaeology provides both a very old and fairly new way of looking at Greek warfare. There is a vast range of archaeological material relating to Greek warfare, from military equipment to soldier tombstones, iconographic depictions of battle, and defensive architecture – traditional forms of ‘military archaeology’. This evidence has often been used to supplement the historical record when discussing Greek warfare, but has rarely made a significant independent contribution to the discipline.
However, the way that archaeological material is used to study historic warfare is beginning to change, due in no small part to the development of the related fields of battlefield archaeology and conflict archaeology, which are rapidly superseding their increasingly old-fashioned military counterpart. The focus within these new disciplines is to use the archaeological assemblages created by warfare to explore individual instances of conflict, and reconstruct the human behaviour which led to their creation. This approach is proving effective across historical periods, including the Roman world, but has yet to be widely adapted in the field of Greek warfare, despite an obvious potential for addressing questions that cannot be answered from the historical record alone – and the fact that a form of proto-battlefield archaeology was being practiced in Greece over a century before the methodology was formally developed in the 1980s.
This talk presents an overview of the archaeological evidence relating to Greek warfare, focusing on artefacts, battle-related constructed features, and monuments found on individual conflict sites. It considers what they tell us about the process of battle within Greek warfare, with particular attention paid to post-battle activity, such as the looting of the battlefield and the disposal of the battle-dead. It also discusses the potential contribution of archaeology to the future study of Greek warfare, particularly the development of period-specific protocols for studying Greek battlefields and conflict sites.
More information on the webinar series main page.
Image credit: Julian Winchester
