As the 2014 centenary of the First World War approaches, there is little doubt that the archaeology of the Great War has established itself firmly in the public mind, in the world of professional archaeology and in the academic world of universities in the United Kingdom and beyond. The last few years have seen many new books appear, each adding to our store of knowledge and understanding, and offering different perspectives on how archaeology can make sense of the recent past in time of war. Yet, the idea behind Killing Time remains distinctive. It was always to present an overview, to explore how modern archaeology of the First World War must heed its responsibilities and embrace its multidisciplinary potential, helping new generations to understand the legacies of war and its heritage – for themselves and for others.
Since the first edition was published in the spring of 2007, advances in First World War archaeology have been so rapid that a paperback version of the book required a substantial update. The opportunity has been taken to make minor adjustments throughout the book and update the bibliography, but mainly to offer an overview of recent developments in this new chapter.
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Anthropology, which has shaped much of First World War archaeology, has continued to exert a profound influence, though few of those involved would call themselves anthropologists. Studies of the material culture of the Great War, from trench art souvenirs to whole conflict landscapes, have informed new exhibitions, conferences (and associated publications), particularly at the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres and the Historial de la Grande Guerre at Péronne. The explosion of new publications, in French and Flemish as well as English, attest to a new kind of scholarship, avowedly archaeological, but drawing variously on cultural history, military history, art history and the work of heritage professionals.
The men and women who were involved in, or who were affected by the war, have now closed the door on our world. Henry Allingham and Harry Patch, First World War British veterans, both died in 2009 cutting the links between the living and the dead. All three veterans in the photograph at the beginning of this book are now gone, and the image itself has taken on a new resonance. We are now truly in the world of archaeology, where our understanding of the past can no longer be refined or corrected by talking to those who took part. Their voices are silent, but their message lives on.
In conflict landscapes, museums and private collections, objects are consequently of increasing importance to our understanding of the war. Interpretation is not only enriched by the countless diaries and official papers of military and cultural history, but also by the insights gained by archaeologists who crouch in excavated trenches first dug and last occupied by the men whose lives and experiences they seek to comprehend. The breadth of new investigations is impressive. While archaeologists find a pipe, a tobacco box, or a lighter made of bullet cartridges, others, such as Patrice Warin – the doyen of French trench art collectors – publish books that provide astonishing images and details of the social and material worlds of tobacco smoking during the war (Warin 2009).
Television has continued to fund new Great War excavations, though for some this remains controversial. Of the many programmes that have been produced in the last three years, perhaps the most emotionally resonant has been the YAP Films documentary called Vimy Underground, first broadcast in 2007. It focused on Maison Blanche, an underground cave near Vimy Ridge, which gave shelter to Canadian and British soldiers during the war, was visited during the inter-war years, and also provided refuge during the Second World War.
What makes this subterranean bolt-hole so fascinating is that it has preserved a gallery of images, names, and insignia carved and scrawled on the limestone walls. YAP Films’ researcher Judy Ruzylo tracked down Aleck Ambler in Saskatchewan, Canada, whose stonemason father, Private A.J. Ambler, carved some of the regimental images with a professional flourish. Aleck was flown to northern France and filmed as he encountered with eye and finger-tips the work of his long-dead parent. The following year, Aleck’s wish that his father’s work be repatriated was fulfilled when plaster casts of the originals arrived in Canada – Aleck passed away just a few days later.
Museums have also taken a lead, organising exhibitions and conferences that have pushed forward the boundaries in our understanding of the cultural experiences of the war and its aftermath. Epitomising this approach is the research of Dominiek Dendooven at In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres, which focuses on the multicultural contribution to the First World War in Belgian Flanders, presented to the public in the extraordinary exhibition Man – Culture – War in 2008 (Dendooven and Chielens 2008; Anon. 2010). Equally significant, though in a more technical sense, was the publication of Images of Conflict: Military Aerial Photography & Archaeology (Stichelbaut et al. 2009), based on an earlier conference also organised by the In Flanders Fields Museum. For the first time, the diversity of military aerial images from the first fifty years of the twentieth century was set in a broad context, where empirical knowledge and theoretical analysis appeared side by side.
The aspiration expressed in the first edition of Killing Time has been realised through the influence of First World War archaeology in extending its interdisciplinary approach to all conflicts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, whether these are traditional wars between nation states – such as the Second World War and the Vietnam War, or civil conflicts, such as the Bosnian War of 1992–5. Embracing this wider notion, First World War archaeology has been in the vanguard of the emerging discipline of ‘Modern Conflict Archaeology’, and is no longer trapped inside the straitjacket of traditional ‘Battlefield Archaeology’, where so many opportunities for investigation are ignored due to the absence of a formal battlefield.
Particularly important has been a growing interest in the archaeology of the Second World War, where the influence of anthropology has marked the most innovative of studies to appear so far. The work of Gabriel Moshenska has begun laying the foundations of a sophisticated and multidisciplinary approach to this second global conflict (2009), for example in a study of the shrapnel collecting habits of children between 1939 and 1945 (2008). Equally distinctive has been the path followed by Gilly Carr, whose work on the material culture of occupation on the Channel Islands is opening up a new field of research (2009).
This broadening of horizons has resonated with younger generations, and not only the schoolchildren who visit the battlefields on organised tours. At universities, too, the archaeology of modern conflict is finding a home, attracting an increasing number of students interested in an archaeological approach to the First World War and other recent conflicts. The current research of postgraduate students at Bristol University, for example, promises to significantly extend the breadth of modern conflict archaeology on an international scale.
Commemoration, too, forges new links between the First World War, its archaeology, and more recent conflicts. The Remembrance Day ceremonies of 11 November show how visceral and emotive such connections can be. The Remembrance Poppy, with its origins in the Great War, is surely one of the most powerful (and ironically, fragile) artefacts created during the twentieth century. It has renewed its pull on the collective souls of Britain and Canada especially, through the seemingly constant flow of the dead and maimed repatriated from conflicts first in Iraq and now Afghanistan.
By far the most obvious development over the past few years, however, has been the increase in the number of archaeological excavation projects, large and small, that have begun, or gathered pace, in France, Belgium, the United Kingdom, and beyond. The following is an overview of these new endeavours.
First World War archaeology, as we have seen, is not only tied to investigating places where battle has raged. Nowhere is this better seen than in projects that have recently begun in the United Kingdom, and that investigate conflict landscapes that owe their existence to the war, but never saw actual fighting.
Investigations into First World War training grounds began before 2006 and have continued apace over the past few years, accelerated by the work of Martin Brown and Richard Osgood of the Defence Estates (Ministry of Defence) on Salisbury Plain. Brown, especially, is concerned with a much wider appreciation of training trenches in the United Kingdom, particularly at Cannock Chase, the Silloans trenches on the Otterburn Traning Area, and at RAF Halton. Building on their previous investigations, Brown and Osgood have supervised a team from Bristol University in excavating the Bustard training trenches and surrounding area since 2008. The results so far support the view that these trenches were cleaned up before being backfilled after the war, as one prehistoric flint, but no cartridges or military debris have been found. One trench floor did however preserve the dark staining of a wooden duckboard.
Hardly a stone’s throw from these trenches is Half Moon Copse, and an extraordinary living memorial to men who have passed through the area from the First World War to the present day. Carved into the bark of beech trees are the names and insignia (arborglyphs) of the soldiers who trained here during the Great War, such as the Australian Lance Sergeant Clyde Henry Walker, who won the Military Medal for bravery under fire in France in 1917. A year later he returned to England for training on Salisbury Plain where he carved his name with a penknife or bayonet on a beech tree at Half Moon Copse (Summerfield n.d.:51,54–55). Lance Corporal Alexander Todd of the Anzac 3rd Division was another soldier traced from his arboreal graffiti (Brown and Osgood 2009: 45–46). He died of wounds in France in October 1918, but left his evocative mark on Salisbury Plain. Other names and images appear on beech trees in nearby Polo Wood. Both areas have been the subject of an innovative study over several years by Chantel Summerfield (2009), creatively combining painstaking recording and archival searches of names, and subtly blending ideas of landscape, identity, and commemoration.
Proof of the vibrancy and diversity of this new kind of archaeology is the addition of a recent conflict dimension to a well-established public archaeology project in Norfolk. The ‘Sedgeford Historical and Archaeological Research Project’ began in 1996 and continues today. While mainly concerned with the excavation of an Anglo-Saxon village and cemetery of c.AD 750–950, project archaeologists began to investigate Sedgeford Aerodrome in 2009, which was home to a Royal Flying Corps (RFC) training airfield during the First World War.
Aerial photographs and archaeological remains indicate that by 1918 the aerodrome was virtually a small town, with hangars, workshops, barracks, tents, and its own railway. Hundreds of people lived and worked here, transforming the everyday life of the surrounding area. Fortunately, since 1919, the aerodrome has been used mainly for farming, and during the Second World War it was only a decoy airfield. Consequently, the remains of this First World War aerodrome are exceptionally well-preserved and even include several intact buildings.
Sedgeford Aerodrome is an unusual time capsule, an important site for conflict archaeology, though not for battlefield archaeology as no fighting occurred there. Its remains are being explored with a combination of desktop research, GPS survey, standing-building recording, sample excavation, and analysis of the rich finds that have been recovered. The aim is to reconstruct the society of the airfield and assess its economic, social, and cultural impact on a relatively remote rural community during the First World War, and to a lesser extent, the Second World War – a key element of conflict archaeology’s anthropological approach.
The first investigations in the summer of 2009 focused on a mortuary, an air-raid shelter, the site of former barrack-blocks, and a rubbish dump which spanned both the First and Second World Wars, and included a large number of bottles. Every archaeological site has at least one feature which seems to define its uniqueness in often strange and unfamiliar ways. At Sedgeford Aerodrome, this is the mortuary – a grim reminder of a well-known historical fact that more First World War airmen died in training and air accidents than in combat. Sedgeford Aerodrome, while not a battlefield, was nevertheless a place of death. The casualties here were no less victims of the Great War than the infantry mown down by machine-guns on the Somme in 1916 or at Passchendaele a year later.
The mortuary was a building whose decorative architectural flourishes were appropriate to housing the honoured war dead, but which was also concealed from general view. It lies hidden in a wood at the centre of the airfield, in a liminal part of the landscape, where ambiguity reigns. Some of the young men whose bodies passed through its portals were buried in local cemeteries, while others, it must be assumed, went home.
The new investigations at Sedgeford Aerodrome show how modern conflict archaeology is associated with traditional archaeology, how it differs utterly from battlefield archaeology, and how it can ask, and hopefully sometimes answer, hitherto unspoken questions about the experiences of those whose lives were changed forever by occupying a conflict landscape which was hundreds of miles away from the battle-zones of France and Belgium. The work at Sedgeford Aerodrome demonstrates how modern industrialised war blurs the distinction between front line and Home Front, and how archaeology can yield insights into a Home-Front phenomenon known previously only from historical sources.
The archaeology of First World War aerodromes is a new endeavour and as yet hardly begun. It also extends into a wider analysis of the relationship between landscape and airscape, not least concerning the Zeppelin raids on Britain from 1915 to 1918. Wartime damage inflicted by Zeppelin bombs has been called ‘The First Blitz’ and Zeppelin crash sites have already been investigated (Faulkner and Durrani 2008). None of these are battlefields, but all are conflict zones where buildings were destroyed and people (mainly civilians) were killed and injured. The afterlife of crashed Zeppelin aluminium airframes, which saw the metal scavenged by the curious as mementos, or reworked as souvenir trench-art pins and badges, is a virtually untouched topic for the anthropological side of modern conflict archaeology (Saunders 2003: 93, 96, 139–141).
Sedgeford Aerodrome typifies these multidimensional issues because L70, the last Zeppelin to raid Britain, was shot down in August 1918 just off the Norfolk coast with the loss of all its crew. The victorious British biplane lost its way coming home, but saw the night-lights at Sedgeford Aerodrome, which did secondary service as a reserve landing-strip for Britain’s First World War air-defence. Sedgeford, and other similar aerodromes, were not simply airfields, but rather part of a complex new weapons system, geared to war in the third dimension. Once again, we see that the First World War’s industrialised nature of mass production and cutting-edge war technology played havoc with traditional ideas of dangerous battlefields and safe homes.
On a grander scale, but evoking similar ideas and a multidisciplinary approach, is ‘Digging Dad’s Army’ (DDA), an ambitious long-term project based at Bristol University, but focused on exploring the archaeological and anthropological traces of the First and Second World Wars and the Cold War in London. The project’s wider interests, and its orientation, are clear in its subtitle – ‘The East and South-East London People’s War Project’.
The DDA’s investigations began in 2009, seeking to add an archaeological dimension to the term ‘People’s War’, a phrase commonly used in historical sources, but hardly ever defined. Its key aim is to explore archaeologically and anthropologically all aspects of twentieth-century conflict in a densely populated urban landscape, and to record popular experiences of modern conflict between 1914 and 1952. To achieve this, investigations include research into official and community archives and oral history, as well as archaeological reconnaissance, survey, and excavation.
Archaeologists have initially focused on an area which extends from Eltham and Shooters Hill in southeast London, through the Woolwich Arsenal/Creekmouth area, to Wanstead Flats in northeast London, which housed anti-aircraft sites, a POW Camp, and an Army Transit Camp for the 1944 D-Day invasion force. This geographical study area has extraordinary potential, not least of which is the size and importance of the Woolwich Arsenal, whose arms research, production, and distribution complex operated during the entire first half of the twentieth century. The research area also corresponds to a First World War air-defence line (with two known balloon-aprons, one at Creekmouth, one at Wanstead Flats), and AAA positions at Woolwich Garrison, Shooters Hill, and One Tree Hill, and incorporates also the Second World War anti-invasion ‘Stop Line B’.
There is an already-established project in the Shooters Hill area of Woolwich which contains a wealth of known military and civilian sites, including anti-aircraft defences, military defences, and Civil Defence buildings. This investigation was filmed for a Time Team television episode called Blitzkrieg, broadcast in 2008 (Brockman 2009; Brockman and Barton 2009).
DDA brings together a diversity of approaches to studying a range of issues under the umbrella of modern conflict archaeology. These include the development of British air-defence systems from 1915 to 1945, and the refinement of ‘stop-line’ anti-invasion defences in London’s heavily urbanised landscape between 1939 and 1945. Equally important, is the intention to chart the popular experience of the militarization of East London during the Second World War, particularly in relation to working-class politics and institutions such as the Home Guard. Post-war realities too will be investigated, not least the culture of commemoration as displayed in war memorials, personal items, and the listing and preservation of wartime buildings.
A crucial element of the DDA investigations is that they are seen not only as an example of modern conflict archaeology, but also by their very nature are responding to an urbanised People’s War with a People’s Archaeology. In other words, DDA projects are an exercise in what has come to be called Public Archaeology – where the local community is fully involved in research and in the dissemination of knowledge. Local newspapers, radio and television coverage attract local views and memories of past events and places, and schoolchildren are invited to excavate archaeological trenches.
At Eaglesfield Park, Shooters Hill, DDA archaeologists have forged a relationship with several local schools, and when excavations are undertaken pupils can gain hands-on experience of surveying and digging the heritage of their own community. They are also invited to examine the same maps and aerial photographs that the archaeologists use to guide their research, and then walk the landscape with a team member and point out the features on the ground that they have seen in the documents. In an instant, archaeology casts off its remote and academic nature, and becomes an integral part of understanding a landscape – of stories of parents and grandparents, and of how the local community came to be what it is today.
By the end of 2009, important advances included an exploration of the Creekmouth area where debris from crashed Zeppelins was stored during the First World War; the excavation of a Second World War zig-zag trench; the investigation of features associated with London Barrage Balloon sites, and a number of field schools held to train volunteers in the various skills of modern archaeology. Most exciting of all, was the discovery, investigation, and temporary public display of a First World War AAA gun site at Eaglesfield Park. Local interviews combined with documentary sources and geophysical survey identified the location, which soon became the first of its kind to be excavated.
The Western Front remains not only a symbolic landscape for our time, but also the centre of attention for much First World War archaeological investigation. In the last few years, several new projects have added significantly to our understanding of the war itself, and also of its often tangled and contentious legacies.
Although the Ypres Salient in Belgium and the Somme in France have dominated our understanding of First World War conflict landscapes, many other sites of epic struggle exist. One of these lies in western Belgium, in an area known as Ploegsteert-St Yvon (called ‘Plugstreet’ by the English-speaking soldiers of 1914–18). It was the scene of bitter fighting in 1917, and memorably saw the detonation of nineteen Allied mines beneath German front-lines on the morning of 7 June of that year at the opening of the Battle of Messines.
In August 2007, a team of archaeologists led by Martin Brown and Richard Osgood began excavating at Plugstreet, across an area which included the Allied front line (held by the Australian 3rd Infantry Division), the opposing German trenches, and the No Man’s Land in-between (Brown and Osgood 2009). The project was ambitious, international, and interdisciplinary from the start, and sought to extend an understanding of the Australian experience of war which had begun in the Salisbury Plain trenches where the Australians had trained. The Plugstreet team included professional archaeologists and anthropologists, but also a host of technical experts, such as conservation specialist Rob Janaway from Bradford University, aerial photograph expert Birger Stichelbaut from Ghent University, geophysics professional Peter Masters from Cranford University, and Peter Chasseaud, who combines his flair as a landscape artist with being the authority on Great War trench maps.
Ploegsteert-St Yvon, like all First World War battle-zones, is simultaneously an agricultural landscape, an industrialised slaughter house, a tomb for ‘the missing’, a place for returning refugees, a tourist destination, a location of memorials and pilgrimage, a site for archaeological research, cultural heritage development, and, of course, a still deadly location of unexploded shells and bombs. The Plugstreet Project aimed to ‘unpack’ each of these landscapes, in order to understand them as ways in which different people engage with the area, and thereby to acknowledge, interpret, and preserve the various juxtaposed histories of the region.
The events of 1917 destroyed a largely medieval landscape, finely balanced between architectural splendour, and such rural features as the sophisticated medieval drainage systems, field boundaries, coppices, and moated-farms. This landscape became a factory of industrialised death – ‘drenched with hot metal’, cut by trenches, undercut by mining tunnels, swathed in barbed wire, poisoned with gas, soaked with human blood, and disfigured by blasted trees and shell craters. At the Factory Farm site, an upturned German bunker now sits just below the water level of the flooded mine crater blown on 7 June. The crater is fringed by willows, and nearby, the modern fields are defined by post-1918 boundary ditches that in fact are a testament to a re-emergent medieval landscape.
The area had been explored by local investigators before the Plugstreet Project began. In 2003–4, the remains of two German soldiers had been found in the debris thrown up by the mine explosion which destroyed the Factory Farm bunker. Amongst the artefacts was a fragmentary identity disc which allowed one of the bodies to be identified as Julius Wilhelm Brugger of the 2nd Company of the 5th Bavarian Regiment, killed when the mine detonated (Brown and Osgood 2009: 135). This discovery indicated that, while the Plugstreet Project was a multidisciplinary investigation of a battle-zone landscape, and not a ‘bone hunt’, it was not impossible that its archaeologists might encounter human remains.
During excavations near to Ultimo Crater – in an adjacent part of the investigation area – the remains of an anonymous Australian soldier of 33rd Btn, 3rd Australian Division, were discovered on 5 August 2008. He was one of the missing soldiers recorded on the Menin Gate at nearby Ypres. The skeleton was damaged, but mostly complete, and there were no signs that he had been buried by his comrades or the Germans, or that any of his possessions had been removed. In other words, he was found as he fell. In addition to barbed wire, shrapnel balls, fired German Mauser cartridges, and a small box respirator, the archaeologists noticed that his left hand still clasped the stock of his Lee Enfield rifle.
Although his nationality was established by the presence of collar badges and a shoulder title with the Australian ‘Rising Sun’ design, there was nothing which identified him by name. Later investigation revealed that thirty-eight men went missing in this area at this time, but that twenty-four were recorded as being buried in temporary graves. Of the remaining fourteen, isotope analysis at the University of Leuven further narrowed the possibilities down to five individuals. One of these men is the anonymous Australian.
Several items opened the door to this dead soldier’s social world from 1917. Amongst his possessions was found a spiked German pickelhaube helmet, probably from a Hessian regiment and belonging to an NCO. These were popular souvenirs amongst Allied soldiers. It is possible that the anonymous Australian picked it up in the German front-line trench as he passed through, though more likely he acquired it as a war souvenir en route to the front and kept it with him to avoid the danger of it being pilfered. A small altered copper bullet casing was also found, and this may have served as an amuletic charm. Both items humanised the skeletal remains, and connected him to the world of souvenir collecting during the war, and to the battlefield superstitions that attached themselves to men about to face death.
Project archaeologists and specialists have ranged over the Ploegsteert-St Yvon area for three years, surveying and excavating Great War trenches, a Lewis machine gun position, the remains of a concrete blockhouse, and miscellaneous features. Bullet cartridges, barbed wire, shrapnel balls, shell fragments, and unexploded artillery shells – the normal debris of war – have all been found, but so have fragments of rum jars, HP sauce bottles, and a variety of surprisingly intact glass bottles once containing medicines. More personal was a beautifully preserved pocket knife, and more surreal, the contorted remains of pre-war crockery and glass fused into strange shapes by the heat of the exploding mines.
Between 2007 and 2008, sixteen hectares of the investigation area were surveyed using a gradiometer, and revealed a scene invisible to the naked eye today – a lunar landscape of trenches, craters, and metal fragments lying just beneath the modern surface. Aerial photographs taken during the war often show clearer detail, but while camouflage tactics might fool the camera, they are exposed by modern geophysical prospection. The use of such techniques, when combined with trench maps and a GIS inventory of aerial photographs, gives an unprecedented view of the palimpsest of Plugstreet’s battle-zone landscapes (Masters and Stichelbaut 2009).
More contentious than the investigations at Ploegsteert-St Yvon has been the excavation of Australian and British soldiers’ bodies from a mass grave at Fromelles over the border in France. This investigation epitomises some of the fundamental issues concerning First World War archaeology, and indeed, the excavation of many conflict landscapes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For these landscapes are a complex layering of human actions, experiences, emotions, and memories that have mingled with the physical remains of war for almost a century.
The Battle of Fromelles took place between 19–20 July 1916, and was intended partly as a diversion from the Battle of the Somme further south. Australian and British soldiers joined forces to take a German position nearby the village of Fromelles, some 16km from Lille. The attack was a disaster, no ground was won, and the allies suffered terrible casualties – some 5,533 Australians and 1,500 British soldiers killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. Jimmy Downing, a survivor, recalled how ‘The air was thick with bullets, swishing in a flat, criss-crossed lattice of death. Hundreds were mown down in the flicker of an eyelid.’ (Murray 2010).
The victorious Germans buried the allied dead in mass graves, and most of the bodies were relocated and reburied by the Imperial War Graves Commission during the 1920s. Rumours persisted that another mass grave lay undiscovered nearby. In 2007, Tony Pollard and archaeologists from Glasgow University followed up a lead given by Lambis Englezos, an amateur Australian historian, whose research identified a field near Bois Faisan (‘Pheasant Wood’), just outside Fromelles. Commissioned by the Australian government, the Glasgow team conducted geophysical and metal detector surveys that indicated the presence of mass burials, and in addition discovered Australian Army artefacts. In May 2008, an exploratory excavation uncovered human remains, as well as badges and buttons that confirmed the identity of the bodies as Australian and British. The magnitude of the discovery was unique in First World War archaeology, and a few months later it was announced that all the bodies would be exhumed and reburied with full military honours by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in a new war cemetery to be built nearby.
Retrieving the dead of the Great War is never straightforward. While the initial investigations had been carried out by Glasgow University, the responsibility for full-scale excavation and exhumation was put out to tender, and eventually the project was awarded to ‘Oxford Archaeology’, a well-respected commercial archaeological practice which quoted significantly less than rival university-based bids. The Oxford Archaeology team included not only archaeologists, but also forensic anthropologists, a pathologist, and an anatomical mortuary technologist, as well as bone specialists, surveyors, and finds experts (Loe 2009). Part of the strategy was to take DNA samples in the hope of identifying as many individuals as possible. The excavation of the remains lasted from May to September 2009, and in total some 250 bodies were recovered.
The bodies of the dead at Fromelles soon found themselves in the eye of a gathering storm. Accusations were made against the Oxford Archaeology team concerning their procedures, the secrecy of the operation, and a timescale for retrieval considered too short by some for DNA analysis. In Australia especially, descendants of soldiers lost at Fromelles voiced their frustration. Tim Whitford, whose great uncle, Private Henry Victor Willis, is among the dead, was angry that the identification process was reportedly being hurried. ‘What’s the rush? They’ve waited 93 years’, he said (Dayton 2009).
To calm these feelings, and restore confidence in the exhumation process, senior figures from the world of archaeology, and British and Australian government officials, visited the excavation to see for themselves. Shortly afterwards, official statements were issued that all were fully satisfied with the professionalism of the Oxford team and the results of the work.
The remains of the soldiers recovered from Pheasant Wood will be reburied over a period of months in 2010, in the first new CWGC cemetery to be built in fifty years. There are currently no headstones, as the hope is that ongoing analysis of the DNA and other artefacts may provide definitive identifications. A commission of specialists will deliberate each case, and for those whose names have been agreed, permanent headstones will begin appearing in April. The first interment of a single unnamed soldier took place under a blanket of snow on 30 January. As flags were lowered, the Last Post sounded, and a volley of three shots pierced the air.
Since 2006, the Great Arab Revolt project (GARP) has continued to explore and investigate the archaeological traces of Lawrence of Arabia’s war in southern Jordan. It has made dramatic progress in understanding how the Arab-British desert insurgency succeeded in containing and ultimately defeating the Ottoman forces in this region – insights aided by the cooperation of Jordanian archaeologists from the al-Hussein bin Talal University at Ma’an and Wadi Mousa. It has also generated much official interest from the Jordanian government concerning the potential for heritage tourism and a broader understanding amongst Jordanians of the course and consequences of the Arab Revolt. In many respects, these investigations have focused attention on the potential of the distinctive interdisciplinary approach of modern conflict archaeology.
As GARP investigations continued after 2006, it became increasingly clear, in those areas associated with the defence of the Hejaz Railway, that there existed many archaeological traces of a hitherto unknown Ottoman militarization of the landscape. These defences were a response to the widespread low-level guerrilla activity that occurred in the area after the Arab-British capture of the Red Sea port of Aqaba in July 1917. Camel-borne Bedouin, Arab regular troops, and British and French specialist units combined their forces to attack the fixed positions of the Ottoman army, advised and trained by Germany. These tactics put into practice the ideas of guerrilla warfare which T.E. Lawrence was beginning to advocate: operating in small local groups, avoiding set-piece battles, making war on matériel not men, and being an omnipresent, but almost always invisible threat. It was identifying the archaeological imprint of this ‘war of detachment’ which became a central feature of GARP’s work from 2007 onwards.
Survey and excavation at the major Hejaz railway station of Ma’an continued in 2007, mainly along the nearby ridge known as the ‘Hill of the Birds’, which has preserved almost intact a wartime Ottoman trench system. Today, there is still a well-defined crenellated firing trench which stretches 725m along the ridge, with a second trench extending for 500m along the south-west approaches. Communication trenches criss-cross the area, three redoubts anchor the system, and four artillery emplacements were located near to the best-preserved of these strong-points – the so-called Northern Redoubt.
The analysis of the previous year’s metal detecting survey, and the results of 2007’s excavations, suggest that many of the artefacts recovered probably represent archaeological traces of the First Battle of Ma’an in April 1918, during which Arab forces briefly occupied part of Ma’an station before being thrown back by Ottoman counter-attacks. The careful investigation of the site’s horizontal stratigraphy indicated two periods of development, with earlier shallow linear trenches later reinforced or replaced by deeper ring-trench redoubts. The reasons for this are unclear, though it is possible that they were a response to advice from the visiting German general Erich von Falkenhayn, whose new ideas of defending landscape abandoned linear defences (as used in the 1916 Battle of the Somme) and replaced them with interrelated strong-points (as deployed in the 1917 Battle of Passchendaele).
Excavation and survey also continued during 2007 at the small Hejaz railway station of Wadi Retm, some 60km south of Ma’an. The previous year’s recording of the ruinous station buildings was completed, as was the excavation of the nearby Ottoman tented camp. This campsite sits on a hill which commands views of the nearby railway to the north-east, and the traditional route through the wadi to the south-west. The site has firing dugouts with stone parapets, some twenty stone-lined tent-rings, an oven, and a latrine. The tent rings were similar to those made by the Bedouin, but revealed their military origins by being laid out with linear regularity, and yielding tent pegs, pieces of tent canvas, sand bags, and many Ottoman army uniform buttons.
Landscape walking in the Wadi Retm area added a new dimension to understanding these desert surroundings. It soon became clear that the isolated railway station sat within an extensively militarized landscape, which had not been recognised or mentioned by Lawrence, or other historians. Only the Bedouin, it seems, had known of these military features, and they had told few outsiders.
As one field reconnaissance expedition followed another, a pattern began to emerge. It seems that to control the Wadi Retm area, the Ottomans depended on the inter-visibility of isolated military sites in a landscape whose tortuous geography conspired to block direct lines of sight between the railway station and outlying strong-points. They overcame these obstacles by building strong-points at critical locations, such as a defended observation point/machine-gun position on a small hill lying 200m north-west of the station. Similarly well-sited was a large rectangular fortified position perched atop a 1,130m-high sandstone ridge, and overlooking the station from the north-east. German Mauser cartridges, Ottoman army buttons, and artillery shell fragments were found at this well-defended location. From both these points of inter-visibility, flag semaphore or heliograph could have conveyed messages to the railway station.
A new discovery at the end of 2007 shaped the following year’s investigations. At the northernmost part of the wadi, a large cliff-top fort was discovered. Never mentioned in the military histories of the Great Arab Revolt, this impressive structure overlooks a strategic bend in the Hejaz Railway as it descends from the stony desert plateau to the sandy wadi floor. In 2008, investigations at the site, called ‘Fassu’ah Ridge’, revealed fortified gun-points, administrative buildings, and internal trench systems.
Scattered along the ridge itself were the remains of other tented encampments, gun positions, observation points, and a mule-tethering site. The Fassu’ah Ridge site itself has the remains of a military road leading down to a presumed halt on the railway, possibly for Ottoman officers to ascend to what probably was the local command-and-control centre.
While these investigations were underway, another team of archaeologists were excavating the remains of a large tented camp at the site of another (and now disappeared) Hejaz Railway station known as Batn Al-Ghoul, lower down the slope from Fassu’ah Ridge. Metal detecting and excavation uncovered many more Ottoman Army buttons, fragments of an Ottoman uniform and a miscellany of pre-war items indicating that long before the Hejaz Railway was built, this place was a stopping point for camel caravans descending into the wadi, en route south to Medina and Mecca. There was no doubt that the archaeology of the Great Arab Revolt of 1916–18 was embedded in a landscape which, while it appeared as a desert wilderness, had been used for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years by people moving north and south for trade and pilgrimage.
GARP’s latest research took place in 2009, and completed the excavations at Batn Al-Ghoul. At the same time, a 50km walking survey of the Hejaz Railway from Ma’an to Batn Al-Ghoul was also completed, mapping every location associated with the Arab Revolt. Exploration, survey, and excavation then moved north-west to the area around the town of Wuheida, in whose nearby wadi the Arab tribes gathered together with their British and French allies between 1917 and 1918.
This large wadi is, on one side, dominated by Ottoman bunkers and trenches, whose excavated remains indicate that the area was fought over by the Turks and the Arabs (and their allies). The Ottoman Turks abandoned their positions which were then occupied by the victors. Across the wadi are the archaeological traces of the Arab encampment – whose tents and connecting pathways are still outlined by stones, and whose investigation yielded a rich and varied array of artefacts. Future work will investigate further at Wuheida, and the surrounding area, as well as survey a recently located Ottoman burial ground further south, on the outskirts of Ma’an.