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A battlefield memorial is designed to preserve a memory of the act of conquest or, in the rare cases of memorials erected by the defeated, a memory of resistance, as well as the more straightforward commemoration of the dead. Where the memory of the landscapes of war persists there must be a commitment to preservation and a continuing, if not necessarily continuous, ritual. Thus each battlefield is not only commemorated or forgotten by contemporaries; it also has an evolving life history. Medieval battlefields were often commemorated by the erection of chapels and other permanent memorials, but after the Reformation they were seen as accidental landscapes which remained unmarked and were gradually reabsorbed into the agrarian pattern. From the eighteenth century battlefields were rediscovered, first by antiquarians, who revived the practice of memorialization, and then by contemporaries who began again to preserve and memorialize the battlefields of the modern world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]