WARFLY · Insects as Silent Witnesses to Prehistoric Warfare: Forensic Archaeoentomology as a Novel Approach to the Study of Conflict
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2016-11-01 → 2018-10-31
- EU contribution
- €185,076
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Insects as Silent Witnesses to Prehistoric Warfare: Forensic Archaeoentomology as a Novel Approach to the Study of Conflict
WARFLY is a ‘proof of concept’ study that aims to develop and test an innovative archaeological approach to investigate scenes of past violence. Studies in conflict archaeology typically focus on analysing the remains of victims of violence, items of weaponry and armoury, defensive architecture and iconographic representations of war. In order to make sense of the often ambiguous evidence at hand, ethnographic and historical accounts are often heavily relied upon. This project seeks to establish an approach that will allow past violent episodes to be reconstructed from detailed investigations of evidence recovered at scenes of prehistoric conflict. The approach integrates insect subfossils ‒ powerful indicators of living conditions, subsistence practices, site formation processes, seasonality, mortuary practices and death circumstances ‒ with other artefactual, architectural and biological data recovered from conflict sites. The project focuses on Nunalleq, a pre-contact (16-17th centuries AD) indigenous (Yup’ik) site which was the scene of violence associated with a conflict referred to by Yup’ik oral historians as ‘the Bow and Arrow Wars’. The permafrost-preserved archaeology at the site includes the remains of a large sod structure, which final floor layers are burnt and overlain by charred roof sods strewn with projectile points and shafts. Excavations have also recovered the remains of several of the conflict victims. Multiple samples of fly, beetle, lice and flea subfossils recovered from house floors and from the victim’s remains are the object of high-resolution spatial and diachronic analyses. The results will form the basis for building a series of possible scenarios, which will be scrutinised through examination of other artefactual and biological evidence available at the site. This project is the first to introduce archaeoentomology – the study of insect remains preserved in archaeological sites – into the realm of conflict archaeology. It will also contribute to the first investigation of the Bow and Arrow Wars from an archaeological perspective.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
WARFLY is a ‘proof of concept’ study that aims to develop and test an innovative approach to investigating past conflict. This novel study will combine well-established methods from archaeology and Quaternary entomology with the philosophical traditions of forensic sciences to advance an approach capable of producing high-resolution reconstructions of conflict episodes in human history based on material evidence. Insect remains preserved in an archaeological site from southwestern Alaska (Nunalleq), which was the scene of violent actions, will be used as ‘silent witnesses’ to the events that preceded, characterised and followed conflict. Fly, beetle, lice and flea remains will be extracted from sediment samples collected from floor layers, burials and deposits formed or altered as a direct result of conflict, to be identified to the highest taxonomic precision achievable. The results will then form the basis of species distribution maps that will be used to model a series of scenarios for pre-conflict lifeways, the attack on the site and the disposal of victims’ corpses. The plausibility of these scenarios will then be scrutinised in relation to other artefactual and biological evidence available at Nunalleq. This approach, which we have termed ‘forensic archaeoentomology’, will not only produce a holistic narrative of a prehistoric warfare episode founded on material evidence, but will also pave the way for an entirely new field of research in conflict archaeology.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITE DE BORDEAUX · BordeauxCoordinatorFrance
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union