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.
