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Tony Pollard and Neil Oliver.
Two Men in a Trench: Battlefield Archaeology - The Key to Unlocking the Past.

London: Michael Joseph, 2002.
ISBN 0718144740.
Hardback, stitch bound.
197x252x28mm.
352pp, illustrated throughout, mostly in colour.
English.
Unused bargain
.

This item £10.00
Publisher's price £20.00

How to order this book

Battlefields are the untold story of British archaeology. As the sites of events which took place over hours rather than years, they have long been considered lacking in archaeological riches. However, recent pioneering work has shown that battlefields can provide dramatic revelations about a battle's course once the archaeologists get digging beneath the surface.

This is where Tony Pollard and Neil Oliver step in. As battlefield archaeologists they are in a unique position to challenge both the historical viewpoint and contemporary eyewitness accounts.

In Two Men in a Trench, Tony and Neil visit the sites of six major British battles, from Shrewsbury to Culloden, and carry out a full archaeological investigation at each. As they uncover artefacts abandoned in the heat and chaos of battle they closely follow the progress of each engagement and answer key historical questions, sometimes totally revising the accepted version of events. Each chapter is a fully framed investigation and follows an episode of the BBC television series. By using archaeology to unlock the secrets of the past, Tony and Neil prove that soldiers do not pass through fields of conflict like shadows, and in the process they show that battlefields are some of our most important national monuments.

Covers the battles of Shrewsbury (1403), Barnet (1471), Flodden (1513), Newark (1642-6), Culloden (1746), and the Firth of Forth (1939).

A word from Tony and Neil ...
"Archaeologists are historians with the gloves off. We excavate the remains of houses, churches, temples, castles, and tombs in the quest for evidence. These sites can tell us about how people lived and even how they treated their dead. Battlefields differ from all of these in that they tell us about where, when and how people actually died. When we discover objects dropped by soldiers, be they the arrowheads or bullets that they used in battle, we may be looking at the movements and actions of a person in the last hours or even moments of his life. War is one of the defining characteristics of the human species. As battlefield archaeologists, we are exploring the dark side of the human character."



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