ABSTRACT

Conflict Landscapes explores the long under-acknowledged and under-investigated aspects of where and how modern conflict landscapes interact and conjoin with pre-twentieth-century places, activities, and beliefs, as well as with individuals and groups.

Investigating and understanding the often unpredictable power and legacies of landscapes that have seen (and often still viscerally embody) the consequences of mass death and destruction, the book shows, through these landscapes, the power of destruction to preserve, refocus, and often reconfigure the past. Responding to the complexity of modern conflict, the book offers a coherent, integrated, and sensitized hybrid approach, which calls on different disciplines where they overlap in a shared common terrain. Dealing with issues such as memory, identity, emotion, and wellbeing, the chapters tease out the human experience of modern conflict and its relationship to landscape.

Conflict Landscapes will appeal to a wide range of disciplines involved in studying conflict, such as archaeology, anthropology, material culture studies, art history, cultural history, cultural geography, military history, and heritage and museum studies.

part I|180 pages

The First World War

chapter 1|31 pages

The dead and their spaces

Origins and meanings in modern conflict landscapes

chapter 2|17 pages

Cutting the landscape

Investigating the 1917 battlefield of the Messines Ridge

chapter 4|19 pages

Conflict gas-scape

Chemical weapons on the Eastern Front, January 1915

chapter 5|22 pages

Controversy in the Julian Alps

Erwin Rommel, landscape, and the 12th Battle of the Soča/Isonzo

chapter 6|16 pages

First World War landscapes on the Alpine front line

New technologies between wish and (augmented) reality

chapter 7|21 pages

Engaging military heritage

The conflict landscape of Val Canale, Italy

chapter 8|19 pages

Conflict, mobility, and landscapes

The Arab Revolt in southern Jordan, 1916–1918

chapter 9|18 pages

Life and death in a conflict landscape

Visitor and local perspectives from the Western Front

part II|128 pages

The Second World War

chapter 10|19 pages

Who owns the ‘wilderness’?

Indigenous Second World War landscapes in Sápmi, Finnish Lapland

chapter 11|19 pages

Operation Northern Light

Remote sensing a Second World War conflict landscape in northern Finland

chapter 12|20 pages

Power of place and landscape

The US 10th Mountain Division, from Colorado to the Apennines

chapter 13|19 pages

War in the Normandy bocage

British perceptions and memory of a militarized landscape

chapter 14|14 pages

Archaeology, D-Day, and the Battle of Normandy

‘The Longest Day’, a landscape of myth and materiality

chapter 15|19 pages

‘An example of Nazi kultur’

Paradigmatic and contested materiality at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp

chapter 16|16 pages

Campscapes and homescapes of the mind’s eye

A methodology for analyzing the landscapes of internment camps

part III|68 pages

Beyond world wars

chapter 17|14 pages

Imagining maritime conflict landscapes

Reactive exhibitions, sovereignty, and representation in Vietnam

chapter 18|19 pages

People, barriers, movement, and art

Contested sandscapes of Western Sahara

chapter 19|17 pages

A Parthian city in the Iran–Iraq War

Incorporating the ancient site of Charax Spasinou into a modern conflict landscape

chapter 20|16 pages

Abstract landscapes

Learning to operate in conflict space