Warfare and defence: what next?

Abstract

The paper considers changing research priorities in the study of defence and warfare during the last 30 years. Attention is drawn to the exceptional richness and variety of defensive works in Britain and the high quality of the associated documentation. The particular importance of the works of the navy is described and their sheer scale is underlined. The dramatic growth of research into the archaeology of 20th-century warfare is reviewed. Among the individual topics deserving specific study in the future are the monuments of the English Civil War; army training; war signal stations; 20th-century civilian defences; oral history; monuments arising from the most recent episodes of warfare; and the personnel who manned defences.This is a slightly modified version of a lecture given to the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology at a one-day seminar at Burlington House, London, in September 2002.

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