Vincent Gaffney

In AD 1071, the Byzantine Emperor, Romanos IV Diogenes, set out from Constantinople for the eastern borders of his Empire with an army described as “more numerous than the sands of the sea”. His military campaign culminated in defeat by the Seljuk Sultan Alp Arslan at the Battle of Mantzikert. This defeat was to have profound consequences for both Byzantine and Turkish history and is still commemorated in the modern state of Turkey. Yet the historical sources for this campaign contain significant gaps and we know more about the political intrigues surrounding the emperor than we do about how the army moved and fed itself. The ‘Medieval Warfare on the Grid’ project (2007-2011) was funded by an AHRC-EPSRC-Jisc e-Science grant and set out to use computer simulation to shed new light on the Mantzikert campaign. In this book we present the results of the project and demonstrate that computer simulation has an important role to play in the analysis of pre-modern military logistics. It can give new context to historical sources, present new options for the interpretation of past events and enable questions of greater complexity to be asked of historical military campaigns. It can also highlight the similarities that exist across time and space when armies need to be mobilised, moved and fed.

The landscape of Fort Hood, in central Texas, presents archaeologists and cultural resource managers with some of their most exacting but absorbing challenges. That much is clear from the activities of the many archaeologists and heritage managers who have sought to use the extensive cultural database and unique landscape of the base as a test bed for research and management methodologies. This project, carried out as an international collaboration between the Fort Hood Cultural Resource Management Team and the Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity (University of Birmingham, UK), sought to provide a novel application of historic landscape characterisation (HLC) methodologies at the base. For decades, the effective stewardship and management of cultural resources at Fort Hood, Texas, has proven to be a formidable challenge. Balancing this responsibility with the Army mission at Fort Hood, which includes ongoing intensive mechanized training across a 217,000-acre military reservation, has tested the abilities of even the most capable of cultural resource managers. The identification of over 2,000 archaeological sites on the installation, while a great accomplishment, pales in comparison to the demands of determining site significance. Now, with this innovative historic landscape characterization study, the authors have presented us with an extraordinary opportunity to view these resources within the context of a cultural landscape that systematically considers the multiple roles of Fort Hood. It is hoped that this will facilitate the move from significance determinations that are site-specific to ones based upon, as the authors state, the concepts of group value and spatial relationships at a landscape level. The accompanying CD (displaying selected data layers provided as Google Earth layers) assists readers in viewing and interpreting the data and the value of HLC procedures and output for the purposes of heritage management. Contents: 1. The Origins and Aims of the Fort Hood Historic Landscape Characterisation Project; 2) Approaches to historic landscape characterisation; 3) Fort Hood in Context; 4) The Fort Hood archaeological database; 5) The historic landscape characterisation project.

The third volume in The Adriatic Islands Project, The work utilises, essentially, the same research methodologies developed for survey on Hvar and Brae. The continuing reliance of project staff on complex computer technologies to store and analyse the large project databases also remains, and the impact of the increasing sophistication of these technologies for display of data can be seen in this publication. This book, covering prehistory to medieval times, is divided into two parts, reflecting the diverse nature of the areas under study.