Title Verdun and the Somme After the Battles: Fragmented Expertise and the Morphology of Long Term Military Contamination
Author(s) Dmitry Nikolaenko
Affiliation New Euro Vision: exhibitions, marketing, research s.r.o.
Country Czech Republic
Contribution type case study; empirical study; conceptual paper; methodological paper
Thematic area • Theory, Methodology, and Evidence
Conference framework connection • Analytical Track AT-01 — provisional title to be defined• Analytical Track AT-02 — provisional title to be defined• Analytical Track AT-03 — provisional title to be defined• Analytical Track AT-04 — provisional title to be defined• Analytical Track AT-05 — provisional title to be defined• Analytical Track AT-06 — provisional title to be defined• Analytical Track AT-07 — provisional title to be defined
Abstract More than a century after the battles of Verdun and the Somme, their transformed territories remain active objects of military history, archaeology, heritage studies, geomorphology, soil science, toxicology, forestry, mine action, and environmental risk management. The quantity and precision of this knowledge are exceptional. Yet the literature does not produce an equivalent understanding of the complete process initiated by industrialised warfare. The same territory is repeatedly divided into specialised objects: a battle, a memorial landscape, an archaeological deposit, a system of war generated landforms, a population of unexploded munitions, a contaminated soil, or a post war disposal site.This paper reviews how the expert representation of Verdun and the Somme changed from 1916 to the present. It distinguishes the operational duration of war from its material duration and compares direct conflict effects with environmental transformations generated by clearance, concentration, destruction, burial, relocation, reconstruction, afforestation, and later management. Verdun and the Somme follow different scientific trajectories, but both reveal the same structural problem: knowledge expands mainly through the addition of increasingly resolved fragments, while the causal transitions between them remain weakly represented.The central conclusion concerns method rather than elapsed time. A century of observation has not automatically produced an integrated morphology of long term military contamination. Another century, or even a millennium, will not change this result if investigation continues to reproduce the same object boundaries. Once initiated by war, contamination develops through physical, chemical, biological, and geomorphological processes that do not respect military chronology, disciplinary divisions, administrative closure, or institutional responsibility. Understanding this process requires reconstruction of transitions: from combat disturbance to material redistribution, intervention, secondary transformation, apparent closure, continuing environmental change, reduced attention, rediscovery, and renewed intervention.Verdun and the Somme therefore demonstrate a distinction between the quantity of available knowledge and the architecture of understanding. The problem does not arise from the failure of individual disciplines. It can emerge from their normal and successful operation when no expert system owns the complete causal chain.
Key points • The material duration of warfare extends beyond the chronological duration of battle.• Expert knowledge on Verdun and the Somme has grown through specialised fragments rather than through a common causal object.• Post war management can transform, concentrate, or relocate military contamination and create second order environmental legacies.• Elapsed time cannot correct a fragmented research architecture; the method of object construction must change.• A morphology of military contamination must preserve causal transitions across disciplines, 
Keywords Verdun; Somme; military contamination; war transformed territory; scientific fragmentation; morphology; environmental persistence; expert communities
Main discussion question Why has a century of increasingly precise research on Verdun and the Somme not produced an integrated morphology of long term military contamination, and what must change in the organisation of investigation for such understanding to become possible?
OJS publication link https://pollution-diseases-ojs.org/index.php/pd/article/view/85
Note. Analytical TracksIn addition to the main thematic areas, the conference programme will include several cross-cutting analytical tracks. These tracks will be defined during the preparation of the programme, based on the submitted abstracts and the emerging links between presentations.At the preliminary stage, abstracts may be assigned to provisional analytical tracks marked as AT-01 to AT-07. Final track titles will be announced after the Scientific Committee has reviewed the submitted materials.