Editorial

With the first issue of the new volume of the Journal of Conflict Archaeology, there have been a few changes. Professor Tony Pollard has stepped back from active editing of the Journal and has joined the editorial panel. He retains an interest in reading the incoming work and will remain active in ensuring that the Journal maintains its track record for publishing conflict archaeology in all of its many forms. Furthermore, as we realised that our editorial panel was entirely male, we have started to address this issue. Our panel now includes Dr Natasha Ferguson and we will be approaching other women working in conflict archaeology. Given that so much interesting work is being undertaken by female scholars involved in initiatives such as War Through Other Stuff, this is long overdue.

In 2016, at Fields of Conflict in Dublin, we presented a paper that looked at the demography of conflict archaeology. This was drawn from papers given at the Fields of Conflict conferences since the inaugural meeting in Glasgow in 2000, and by the papers published in the Journal; we were looking back across 10 years of the Journal and it seemed an appropriate moment to take stock. That paper analysed the nationalities of the authors, the topic of the papers, and the identified gender of the authors. What the analysis showed was that there was a substantial gender imbalance where less than a quarter of authors of papers in either arena came from or involved women; the figure is far worse if looking at lead authors. This imbalance does not reflect the levels of women working in the field. There are clearly a lot more women working on conflict through archaeology, history, museum studies, art history and so forth than the figures represent. There is also a lot of doctoral research being carried out by female scholars. Over time, the imbalance will hopefully fade away; however, as was expressed at a recent War Through Other Stuff meeting at the National Army Museum in London, in the lifetime of the Journal, no papers have been submitted to the Journal looking at women’s experiences or giving a female perspective. It is high time that changed and we are definitely looking for papers to remedy that omission.

Things are changing, of course. The forthcoming Sixth Post-Graduate Conference in Conflict Archaeology in Glasgow in October will have a little under 40% of the speakers being female scholars; we are also hoping that there will be many more papers from women in the 2020 Fields of Conflict which will be in Edinburgh in September 2020. As noted above, it is also to be hoped that there will be papers covering women’s experiences and perspectives. The literature on conflict can be lacking in nuance and diversity at times – it is easy to accept the popular perception of WWI being essentially about white men killing each other. What has become ever more clear over the past few years of intensive research into the First World War as the centenary years came round is that such a perception is wrong. While the majority of deaths were of white men, it ignores the substantial contribution of men from around the world and completely forgets about the large numbers of women who were impacted by the conflict. Looking at the non-white involvement, Britain benefited from the sacrifice of West Indians (from the West India Regiments); of men from the Indian sub-continent (the Sirhind Brigade was largely destroyed in the first mine attack on British positions in 1914; Grieve and Newman 1936, 26–29; Banks 2014, 161); of African soldiers from colonies; and from large numbers of Chinese labourers in the aftermath of the war. For women, there was service at the front line as nurses and roles in admin, cooking, etc.; thousands of British women served in France and elsewhere, facing privation and physical danger (e.g. Leneman 1994). Many of these women came back scarred both physically and mentally from their experiences, and some never came home again. Overlooking the experience of the women at the Front leaves out important elements of the overall story and hides the diversity of experiences behind a fabricated uniformity. This says nothing of the impact of WWI on wives, mothers, or children, or of the social impact of women entering the workplace to produce the weapons and ammunition for the war.

Turning to the content of this issue of the volume, we have four papers. Two look at the matériel of war, focusing on musket balls, while two look more at the personal experiences of war. The geographical range is wide: the papers come from scholars working in England, Hungary, Iran, and Poland; the chronology runs from the seventeenth century to the modern era. Each is a different way of approaching conflict, and each will have a different appeal. The first paper is from Kobiałka, looking at the topic of trench art. Much has been written about trench art, and Professor Nick Saunders has essentially defined the topic in a series of publications (e.g. Saunders 2003). Kobiałka adds to the topic by looking at the trench art of a PoW camp of the Eastern Front in WWI, and comparing it with trench art being produced in the current Syrian Civil War. The paper is thought-provoking and demonstrates the way that time does not change behaviour much in warfare. This is very much about the individual experience, and it is a very human experience where the material of war is turned into art as the human spirit tries to assert itself in the chaos of conflict.

The second paper turns to the topic of musket balls. One important aspect of conflict is to look at the assumptions that we make and test them. Much of the battlefield work that has been carried out over the years has made assumptions about the musket balls recovered in projects. These include the lethality, accuracy, range, etc. of musket balls, and also what diagnostic marks might be left by specific targets when the musket ball hit them. We have published several papers on such topics over the years, and there has been a lot of work carried out at Cranfield University in testing out such questions. The paper by Miller, Alsopp and Carr is a look at the ballistic properties of musket balls and attempts to model the behaviour of musket balls of the seventeenth century in Britain. They focus attention on issues such as the bounce of musket balls after hitting the ground, showing that the initial ground impact (where gravity and friction cause the ball’s flight to decay) is not a good guide to the final location. Their work benefits from using both internal range firing and external firing, giving a high level of confidence in their data. Experiments such as these will help us to interpret battlefields and distribution patterns much more effectively, with confidence in our assumptions.

The third paper is the most theory based and looks at a conflict that we have not previously covered at all. Musavi’s paper looks at the impact of war on an individual soldier through the lens of the injuries that the soldier suffered in the Iran–Iraq War of 1980–1988. In doing so, the author uses embodiment theory to good effect. He argues that soldiers have continuously varying identities, as weapons/victims, friends/enemies, targets/tools. He also argues that war allows political structures to determine the perceived reality of war, by constructing the notion of the enemy and turning men into killers and cannonfodder. There is much food for thought in the paper, and Musavi’s approach has a lot of potential.

The fourth and final paper is a return to musket balls, but without the test firing. Padányi and Ondrék look at the siege of Novi Zrin in 1664, where a small Hungarian and Croatian force held back a large Ottoman Turkish invasion for over a month. Their sacrifice allowed the Habsburg Imperial forces to build up enough strength to destroy the Ottoman army at the Battle of St Gotthard and kept Vienna from Turkish assault for another two decades. The project used metal detecting to find the musket balls and other projectiles relating to the fighting, and then examined the musket balls themselves. The examination included destructive testing that showed the projectiles probably to have been cast in metal moulds as they cooled rapidly. In terms of benefits to battlefield interpretation, the results allowed the project to indicate the types of weapons being used, and the locations of the heaviest fighting. Quite apart from the useful data, the paper also shines light on the conflicts of south-eastern Europe that many in northern and western Europe know little about. These areas were crucial in delaying the advance of the Ottoman Empire long enough for Europe to gather its strength and turn the tide against Ottoman expansion at the siege of Vienna in 1683. It also brings to the fore the work of Hungarian scholars on the warfare in their nation, something of which many in the West know nothing about.

Hopefully, this issue of the Journal will fulfil the brief of opening up the range of work being shared across linguistic barriers. It certainly succeeds in widening the scope of conflicts covered beyond the recent emphasis on Second World War projects. For us to keep the Journal fresh and pushing boundaries, the most important thing is that projects take place and then send in reports for publication. At the moment, things are looking quite healthy, and we have many more interesting projects to report in the next two issues of the Journal.