A Research Seminar hosted by the Department of History and Politics at the University of Chichester.
Between 2005 and 2016, Bristol University’s ‘Great Arab Revolt Project’ investigated the archaeology and anthropology of the Arab Revolt of 1916-18 in southern Jordan. The discoveries were extraordinary. Expecting to find only the ruins of Hejaz Railway stations destroyed by T.E. Lawrence and the Arabs, we discovered instead a vast conflict landscape of guerrilla actions and counter-insurgency tactics unknown to everyone except the local Bedouin. Ottoman Army camps, railway ambushes, Rolls Royce armoured car raiding camps, hilltop forts, machinegun strong-points, and a long-forgotten Royal Flying Corps landing strip all emerged from the desert where modern guerrilla warfare was forged. The legacy of this ‘new’ kind of war has shaped the modern world as well as the Middle East – its lessons learned by everyone from Mao Zedong to Ho Chi Minh, Al Qaeda, the Taliban and ISIS.
Professor Nicholas Saunders is in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Bristol, U.K. His main research interests are the archaeology and anthropology of landscape, material culture, and cultural memory of 20th and 21st-century conflict in Europe and the Middle East. He is co-director of the ‘Great Arab Revolt Project’ in southern Jordan, and ‘The Isonzo Valley 1915-1918: Conflict Landscapes on the Slovenian-Italian Border’ project. He has worked extensively on the material culture of the First World War in Belgium and France. He has organised many academic conferences on modern conflict at the Imperial War Museum and the In Flanders Fields Museum (Ypres, Belgium). He is also editor of two book series on modern conflict for Ashgate and Pen and Sword, and has published widely on conflict topics. His most recent books include: Contested Objects: Material Memories of the Great War (2009), 'Killing Time': Archaeology and the First World War (2010), Bodies in Conflict (2014) and The Poppy: A History of Conflict, Loss, Remembrance and Redemption (2014). His monograph on The Great Arab Revolt project will be published by Oxford University Press in 2017, and an edited volume - Killer Instincts?: Conflict and the Senses – by Routledge, in 2016.
Free entry.
Cloisters Chamber, University of Chichester, Bishop Otter Campus.
Please email Laura Beard on L.Beard@chi.ac.uk for more details.
