War has been a central theme in history since the works of the earliest historians, who recognised it as a force of change in human communities, altering the social, political, economic and ideological makeup of all involved. Nonetheless, traditional discourse has routinely framed war within the ‘Grand Narratives’ of history, emphasising large battles between great states. The more routine small-scale warfare that prevailed throughout history and the effects of warfare on the local population have traditionally been deemed secondary, although this has changed in recent years. In this sense, conflict archaeology and its methodological toolkit have proven especially fruitful in shedding light on conflicts and engagements otherwise ignored or minimised by written sources. In some cases, archaeological battlefield studies have altered widely held perceptions of well-known battles. This book aims to focus on the local and regional scale of warfare in pre-modern societies, analysing the engagements themselves (battlefields, sieges, mass graves and other evidence of collective violence) and their aftermath. This focus shies away from interpreting conflicts from a global, external perspective, and highlights the utility of conflict archaeology for microhistory analysis. Emphasis is placed on the interactions between external and local agents through warfare, on conflicts between local communities, and the influence of the immediate environment, both human and geographical, on armed engagements. This entails re-framing and re-contextualising a wide array of artefacts and contexts, including direct evidence of violence as well as evidence of sudden, violent change among the communities themselves.
