Chersonesan Studies 1 presents the painted grave stelai of the Early Hellenistic necropolis of Chersonesos Taurike, a Greek city on the northern shore of the Black Sea. This unique collection of over one hundred objects is of major interest to students of ancient art and Greek culture. Their polychrome decoration has been extraordinarily well preserved, a rarity in the ancient world. They compose a remarkable, even unique, body of evidence of Greek funerary memorial sculpture: their shapes are gender-specific, their depicted objects are gender- and age-specific, and they can be ascribed to a handful of specific workshops. Their surprising uniformity requires an explanation, since comparable assemblages from other parts of the Greek world show substantial diversity in all these aspects.

This book provides the first complete catalog and description of the stelai, together with full-color illustrations of all the significant stelai and many details. Through his painstaking recovery and reassembling of fragments, as well as the use of advanced photographic techniques, Richard Posamentir has been able to add a whole new dimension to the study of these artifacts. The volume covers the history of the stelai, analysis of the workshops, and reconstruction of the necropolis that the stelai originally graced. A comparison chapter discusses how the stelai fit into the context of Greek funerary art and provides insights into the culture and society of a city on the Black Sea.

The remains of Dutch East India Company forts are scattered throughout littoral Asia and Africa. But how important were the specific characteristics of European bastion-trace fortifications to Early-Modern European expansion? Was European fortification design as important for Early-Modern expansion as has been argued? This book takes on these questions by studying the system of fortifications built and maintained by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in present-day India and Sri Lanka. It uncovers the stories of the forts and their designers, arguing that many of these engineers were in fact amateurs and their creations contained serious flaws. Subsequent engineers were hampered by their disagreement over fortification design: there proved not to be a single “European school” of fortification design. The study questions the importance of fortification design for European expansion, shows the relationship between siege and naval warfare, and highlights changing perceptions by the VOC of the capabilities of new polities in India in the late eighteenth century.

A number of nations, conspicuously Israel and the United States, have been increasingly attracted to the use of strategic barriers to promote national defense. In Do Good Fences Make Good Neighbors?, defense analyst Brent Sterling examines the historical use of strategic defenses such as walls or fortifications to evaluate their effectiveness and consider their implications for modern security.

Sterling studies six famous defenses spanning 2,500 years, representing both democratic and authoritarian regimes: the Long Walls of Athens, Hadrian’s Wall in Roman Britain, the Ming Great Wall of China, Louis XIV’s Pré Carré, France’s Maginot Line, and Israel’s Bar Lev Line. Although many of these barriers were effective in the short term, they also affected the states that created them in terms of cost, strategic outlook, military readiness, and relations with neighbors. Sterling assesses how modern barriers against ground and air threats could influence threat perceptions, alter the military balance, and influence the builder’s subsequent policy choices.

Advocates and critics of strategic defenses often bolster their arguments by selectively distorting history. Sterling emphasizes the need for an impartial examination of what past experience can teach us. His study yields nuanced lessons about strategic barriers and international security and yields findings that are relevant for security scholars and compelling to general readers.

Copublished with Editorial de la Universidad del Magdalena

Global Perspectives on Landscapes of Warfare examines the effects of conflict on landscapes and the ways landscapes have shaped social and political boundaries over time. Contributors from different archaeological traditions introduce a variety of methodologies and theories to understand and explain how territories and geographies in antiquity were modified in response to threat.
 
Drawing from eleven case studies from periods ranging over eight thousand years in the Americas, Asia, and Europe, contributors consider how social groups moved and concentrated residences, built infrastructure, invested resources, created alliances and negotiated with human and nonhuman entities for aid, formed and reformed borders, and memorialized sites and territories. Because landscapes of warfare deal with built environments, chapters are presented with rich graphic documentation—detailed maps, site plans, and artifacts—to support the analysis and interpretations.
 
Territories that have been appropriated and transformed by communities at war illustrate how built landscapes not only reflect immediate events but also influence subsequent generations. With a diverse array of case studies and an explicit focus on landscapes, Global Perspectives on Landscapes of Warfare will be of great interest to students and scholars of conflict archaeology and the anthropology and history of violence across the globe.
 
Contributors: Elizabeth Arkush, Viktor A. Borzunov, Igor V. Chechushkov, Tiffany Earley-Spadoni, Nam C. Kim, Lauren Kohut, Takehiko Matsugi, Kerry Nichols, Russell S. Quick, Lizzie Scholtus, James T. Williams
 

As one of the five pillars of Islam the pilgrimage to Mecca (the Hajj) is central to the life of all Muslims. A network of roads radiates from the Hijaz like a giant spider's web, connecting Mecca to all parts of the Muslim world. Historically the most significant of these routes starts at Damascus in Syria, and is a direct continuation of the ancient trade route connecting Arabia to the Levant. The Prophet Muhammad is known to have used this route when he travelled as a merchant from Mecca to Bosra in Syria. In more recent times this was the route chosen for the Hijaz railway which figured prominently in the great Arab Revolt. A significant part of this route runs through Jordan, from the wide grasslands of the north to the sandy desert of the far south. This book documents the archaeological and architectural remains which line this route, paying particular attention to the forts and cisterns built and maintained by the Ottoman rulers from the 16th century onwards. A series of introductory chapters provide the historical context, with an emphasis on the political and military significance of the route from the 16th to the 18th centuries. In addition to the detailed coverage of Jordanian Hajj forts, the book also describes the sites and path of the route through Syria and Saudi Arabia. The final part of the book describes the results of excavations at one of the forts, which gives an insight into the material culture of both the pilgrims and the soldiers who manned the forts.

From the Chickasaw fighting the Choctaw in the Southeast to the Sioux battling the Cheyenne on the Great Plains, warfare was endemic among the North American Indians when Europeans first arrived on this continent. An impressive array of offensive weaponry and battle tactics gave rise to an equally impressive range of defensive technology. Native Americans constructed very effective armor and shields using wood, bone, and leather. Their fortifications ranged from simple refuges to walled and moated stockades to multiple stockades linked in strategic defensive networks.

In this book, David E. Jones offers the first systematic comparative study of the defensive armor and fortifications of aboriginal Native Americans. Drawing data from ethnohistorical accounts and archaeological evidence, he surveys the use of armor, shields, and fortifications both before European contact and during the historic period by American Indians from the Southeast to the Northwest Coast, from the Northeast Woodlands to the desert Southwest, and from the Sub-Arctic to the Great Plains. Jones also demonstrates the sociocultural factors that affected warfare and shaped the development of different types of armor and fortifications. Extensive eyewitness descriptions of warfare, armor, and fortifications, as well as photos and sketches of Indian armor from museum collections, add a visual dimension to the text.

This is an updated and revised second edition of a handbook originally prepared for the XVIIIth International Congress of Roman Frontier Studies in Amman, Jordan in 2000 - a reflection of the growing importance of Roman studies in Jordan in recent years. In Part A, there are chapters on geography and environment, the Romans in Jordan and the Roman army there. In Part B there are 15 chapters surveying, region by region, the evidence for forts, towers, roads, literary texts, inscriptions and excavation around the entire country, ending with a chapter on the immediately adjacent parts of Roman Arabia that now lie in Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel. The book is profusely illustrated throughout and has many aerial views including 20 full-page photographs in colour.

“[A] stimulating and excellently documented book…Individual personalities are particularly well handled. Foch and Pétain, Poincaré and Blum—all emerge with veritable life in them. The trends of French interwar history are deftly carried through onto these pages with an unobtrusive lucidity and persuasiveness.”—Michael Hurst, American Historical Review

“Admirable…Instead of working backward from 1940, seeking causes and culprits of collapse in the 1930s, Ms. Hughes has wisely chosen to begin in 1918 and to focus upon the 1920s. This chronology has given her a fresher perspective and a wider scope for sympathy than other commentators of the period. It is the great merit of this book that it passes judgments with compassion and restraint. Indeed, Professor Hughes insists upon viewing French military policy in the broadest possible context of international developments, domestic politics, economic problems, and intellectual moods; from these elements, she weaves a dilemma of tragic dimensions in which the confusions and mistakes of individuals are reviewed with kindness and realism.”—Charles C. Bright, Political Science Quarterly

The decision to fortify northeastern France has usually been considered a tragic mistake, an example of bad planning and missed opportunities. Not so, says Judith M. Hughes, who provides a convincing view of how France’s military and political leaders tried to safeguard their nation—and why they failed.