Beyond the Dead Horizon

I am very pleased to have been able to contribute to a new book, Beyond the Dead Horizon, edited by Nicholas J Saunders.

Hadrian and the Hejaz Railway: Linear features in conflict landscapes. Chapter 13.

The Hedjaz Railway was built by the Ottomans to take Hajj pilgrims from Damascus to Medina in the early twentieth century, though it probably also had covert military and geo-political functions. Completed in 1908, it was served by station buildings regularly spaced along its length, many of which were protected by blockhouses and nearby hilltop forts by the time of the Great Arab Revolt of 1916-18, during the First World War. In AD 122, during his visit to Britain, the Roman Emperor Hadrian commissioned his eponymous wall to run from the River Tyne near modern Newcastle to the Solway estuary near Carlisle. It formed the northern limit of the Roman Empire, and was defended at regular intervals by ‘mile castles’ and forts. The Hedjaz Railway and Hadrian’s Wall are iconic linear features in their respective landscapes. They are both liminal entities, designed not as impenetrable barriers but rather as stabilising and boundary-defining constructions for the military, for traders, and as ideological borders for state imperialism. This paper takes changing views of the environs of Hadrian’s Wall as landscapes of danger, military activity, romance, and tourism, and applies them to the Hedjaz Railway in order to generate a new narrative understanding of modern conflict along a linear conflict zone. 

See full details on the Oxbow web pages

Modern Conflict Archaeology New book

Beyond the Dead Horizon: Studies in Modern Conflict Archaeology

 An extract from  the Oxbow web site:-

The new interdisciplinary study of 20th-century conflict archaeology has developed rapidly over the last decade. Its anthropological approach to modern conflicts, their material culture and their legacies has freed such investigations from the straitjacket of traditional 'battlefield archaeology'. It offers powerful new methodologies and theoretical insights into the nature and experience of industrialised war, whether between nation states or as civil conflict, by individuals as well as groups and by women and children, as well as men of fighting age. The complexities of studying wars within living memory demand a new response - a sensitised, cross-disciplinary approach which draws on many other kinds of academic study but which does not privilege any particular discipline. It is the most democratic kind of archaeology - one which takes a bottom-up approach - in order to understand the web of emotional, military, political, economic and cultural experiences and legacies of conflict. These 18 papers offer a coherent demonstration of what modern conflict archaeology is and what it is capable of and offer an intellectual home for those not interested in traditional 'war studies' or military history, but who respond to the idea of a multidisciplinary approach to all modern conflict. 240p, 90 col & b/w illus (Oxbow Books, 2012)

Full details HERE