Premier’s Westfield History Scholarship
The most authentic witness:
Archaeology, landscape and the study
of historical conflict
Michael Molkentin
Shellharbour Anglican College
Sponsored by
Introduction
Move over Indiana Jones, a new breed of archaeologist is taking over the television. In
programs such as Battlefield Detectives, Two Men in a Trench, Finding the Fallen and The Time
Team, they are digging up a picture of our recent military past that is entertaining, broadly
appealing and emotionally evocative. These ‘battlefield archaeologists’ as they are known
are, judging by their ratings, making some good television. But do we really need to dig
to understand the recent past? Don’t archival documents, photographs and eye witnesses
tell us all we need to know? As a military historian I have always regarded the battlefield
archaeology crowd with a degree of scepticism. I considered that, at best, their work was
only capable of illustrating what the documents already tell us.
This year, I attended two archaeological excavations on twentieth century conflict sites
where I had the opportunity to discuss my scepticism with a number of battlefield
archaeologists, observe their work and tap into their body of professional literature. This
article presents an overview of what I learned; and of how, I discovered, battlefield
archaeology is able to contribute to our understanding of the past.
TV Archaeology vs. Academic Archaeology
Television perpetuates a number of misconceptions about archaeology. These need to be
addressed before we can consider what archaeology of the recent past really has to offer
us. To begin with, archaeologists are not just concerned with what is under the ground.
What exists on the surface – artefact scatters, structures and the terrain itself – are all
important forms of archaeological evidence. Drawing on these sources is often more
desirable, and sometimes all that is legally or ethically permitted since excavation is a
destructive and sometimes culturally invasive practice. What’s more, archaeologists spend
the vast majority of their time analysing their evidence, conducting research and
interpreting their findings for the public. This is a process that can stretch into years or
even decades. Yet the format of popular television neglects these facets, opting for the
‘digging for treasure in three days’ approach.
Secondly, the evidence that archaeologists collect – commonly known as artefacts–
constitutes a vastly broader array materials than TV producers typically acknowledge.
Archaeologist Heather Burke reminds us that, “Almost anything can be an artefact
because what we might regard as insignificant today may have had all sorts of meanings
in the past.” As well as the typical military equipment that battlefield sites produce,
archaeologists of historical conflict have used trench art (souvenirs made of battlefield
debris), war memorials, artworks, cemeteries, religious sites, graffiti, bunkers, entire
towns and the terrain itself to tap into the social and cultural dimensions of the recent
past. Just one example of this is archaeologist Nayanjot Lahiri’s work on the
‘commemorative landscape’ of the 1857 mutiny in India. Through an analysis of
cemeteries, memorials and architecture (including the vandalism and renovation of these)
she has revealed how this event has, or in some cases has not been, commemorated in
India and the cultural and political dimensions of this.
Such work suggests that battlefield archaeology is in fact, better termed ‘conflict
archaeology’. In their studies of war, archaeologists study sites well beyond the
boundaries of battlefields. Frontier massacre sites, places of civil unrest, hospitals, air raid
shelters, aerodromes, training grounds and munitions factories all provide evidence to
interpret historical conflict. ‘Battlefield archaeology’ is also a problematic title because it
suggests that its practitioners focus on the archaeology of a single event (a battle) rather
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than on the broader historical landscape in which it occurred. Invariably, archaeologists
examining any site are bound to come across artefacts from before and after the time
period that they are primarily interested in. If examined in a wider context, these can
yield insights into how war shapes landscapes and people’s relationships with them over
time.
In August 2007 I observed an excavation at Factory Farm, a German front line position
in Flanders that was captured by Australian troops during the Battle of Messines in June
1917. This site had a remarkably longer history preserved below the surface than its four
years (1914-1918) as a battlefield. Domestic and rural items from the pre-war layer,
including a medieval bowl, wine glasses and part of the pre-war farmhouse itself, painted
a picture of life in pre-war rural Flanders. The foundations of the original farm held
scatters of German military kit, indicating how the Germans worked the structure into
their fortifications until the Australians captured the position in 1917.
The excavation of a nearby concrete German blockhouse revealed the dire times faced
by the repatriated family in 1920: the structure had been dynamited and its rubble picked
clean of its lucrative iron reinforcing rods. The most recent layer (including evidence on
the surface) carried the story into the present day. The current landowner has erected
electric fences around the huge mine-craters created during the Battle of Messines;
possibly to keep the growing number of battlefield tourists at bay. The archaeology also
suggested how he, like his ancestors in the 1920s, had attempted to reclaim the land from
its tumultuous past. He has bulldozed the mine crater’s distinctive lip to make the still
rough ground more tenable, and had inadvertently unearthed the remains of German
soldiers, but covered them up to avoid disruption to his work.
Some, such as Great War archaeologist Nicholas J. Saunders view such landscapes as
“socially constructed”. He suggests that their “different meanings have affected the lives
of untold numbers of people since 1914, and continue to do so today.” For Saunders,
modern day war memorials and battlefield tourism amenities (or obstructions, as in the
case above) are just as pertinent forms of archaeological evidence as excavated bullets
and bombs.
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The remains of a German pillbox at Factory Farm in Belgium. Evidently, the civilian landowner destroyed it and stripped
its valuable iron reinforcing rods during the post-war era. Prior to excavation, this structure was unknown to exist; it is not
mentioned in any of the available documents.
How can conflict archaeology contribute to our understanding of the
past?
New Interpretations
Despite often playing the “junior partner in the study of historical battles” alongside
archival research, conflict archaeology has demonstrated its potential to shed new light
on old historical questions and problems.
In the Australian context, one of the best examples of interpretive conflict archaeology
was conducted by Charles Bean, official historian of Australia in the First World War.
Bean, who had been present at the Gallipoli landings on 25 April 1915 returned to the
Peninsula in early 1919 to solve what he called “the riddles of Anzac.” Among these were
details relating to the Turkish side of the campaign and its chaotic (and poorly
documented) early days. Although not an archaeologist himself, Bean “based his
approach on the methodology of Oxford historian R. G. Collingwood” who had studied
Hadrian’s Wall. Ultimately, his fieldwork shed new light on the military aspects of the
campaign (such as revealing how far the first ANZACs had made it before being cut off),
identified unburied dead and collected relics for the Australian War Memorial. Bean’s
archaeology thus fed into knowledge, commemoration and public interpretation.
More recently, Richard A. Fox combined technology with fieldwork on the Little Big
Horn battlefield to produce a revised account of Custer’s famous last battle. Traditional
narratives of Little Big Horn have had to rely almost entirely on oral histories, either
from Native American sources (whose oral traditions tend to be treated as suspect by
white military historians) or cavalrymen who were nearby, but not actually with Custer’s
unit. In 1983 Fox and his colleagues conducted an extensive survey of the battlefield and
recovered over 4000 artefacts. They analysed the finds to present a new picture of the
battle, based on bullet trajectories and the distribution of artefacts across the site. Fox’s
new interpretation highlighted inadequacies in the US cavalry’s training and discipline,
the deficiency of their weapons and thoroughly debunked the enduring image of Custer’s
glorious last stand. On a broader level, Fox’s archaeological evidence empowered the
previously muted Indian eye-witness accounts and suggested “why such accounts are the
way they are, and therefore how they might be best employed.” His work also established
a methodology for locating and investigating sites of frontier conflict. It is possible that
conflict archaeology might yet play a role in future debates over the nature of frontier
violence in Australia.
Commemoration and Heritage Conservation
As the veterans of both world wars pass away, people are compelled to seek alternative
tangible links with the past. C. S. Dobson has observed this with the recent popular
interest in preservation of English home front sites from the Second World War that has
resulted from the “dwindling availability of human testimony”. This is not surprising.
After all, following those who were there, landscapes and material remains are the most
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“authentic witnesses” to conflict that we have. Archaeology plays a key role in locating
these material witnesses, conserving them and making them ‘speak’ to the public.
In 2004, archaeologists from Flinders University began a project to locate and excavate
an air raid shelter dating from 1942 at the Daw Park Repatriation Hospital in Adelaide.
The hospital’s identity has always been its war veteran patients, but as their numbers
dwindle, recovering and preserving other aspects of its heritage has become important.
The project’s aims were broad, covering military, social and cultural history, science,
archaeological methodology and anthropology. But the overall purpose sat within a
desire to conserve a fading aspect of the community’s identity and heritage. The
archaeologists were primarily interested in “southern Australia’s defensive landscape and
the place of such a landscape in wider understandings of nationalism and the
construction of local and regional community identity.” As with most conflict
archaeology, the Repat project had associations with anthropology and ‘history from
below’, and was concerned with “focusing the attention of both the local and wider
community on an important and often undervalued aspect of the history of Adelaide: the
perceived threats to ordinary people.”
To begin with, the university conducted exhaustive archival research and oral history
gathering to build up a contextual history around the shelters (and civil defence in
Adelaide). Researchers uncovered a rich culture and folklore surrounding the shelters,
including evidence of their informal use by patients and nurses for romantic interludes
and local school students for skipping class. They also uncovered a local folklore
regarding a ‘secret’ network of tunnels and shelters under the wards. Illustrative of how
difficult it can be to locate even recent sites, the shelter entrance was only located in
September 2007, following two excavations. Although most of the stories relating to
secret tunnels have been so far debunked by the archaeological evidence, the excavation
has engaged the local community with an important aspect of their past that is seldom
covered in traditional narratives of World War II. The digs attracted media coverage,
and were open to the public. Archaeology hence transformed a hospital car park into a
focal point for people’s memories, and reaffirmed the Repatriation Hospital’s heritage.
Depending on what the Hospital decides to do with it, the shelter entrance itself might
become a timely monument in Australia’s otherwise under-memorialised landscape of
civil defence and fear of external enemies.
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Flinders University archaeologists excavating the entrance to the 1942 air raid shelter at Daw Park Repatriation Hospital,
September 2007.
Excavations on the old Western Front have had a similar effect; attracting substantial
public and media attention, and becoming new sites for the preservation and
commemoration of the past. In 2002, the Flemish Heritage Institute surveyed First
World War sites in Belgian Flanders along the path of a proposed motorway (the A19).
As consultants for the Belgian government they were to evaluate what “damage would be
caused to the material and human remains of the area’s wartime archaeological record if
the motorway was built along the projected route.” Several sites were excavated,
including a set of trenches at Wieltje that “shed light on the evolution of trench building”
throughout the war. The remains of thirteen soldiers were also recovered and reburied.
As Nicholas Saunders relates, “As the…archaeologists recovered these remains, there
was a sense that with each discovery another history came into view, and the opportunity
arose of identifying and reclaiming a soldier from the lists of ‘the missing’ engraved on
the Menin Gate and Tyne Cot cemetery”.
News media from around the world flocked to the Institute’s sites and correspondingly,
the archaeologists were swamped with visitors ranging from school children to passing
tourists to curious locals. The link between the visiting public and these unearthed relics
of the recent past was powerful. Visitors turned some of the sites into informal points of
commemoration, at one point covering a site with poppies following the discovery of a
soldier’s remains. Saunders sees this as “Conflict archaeology extending the landscapes of
remembrance, and connecting the public with wider notions of commemoration that
hitherto had been focused almost solely on official war grave cemeteries and monuments
to the missing”. The Institute’s findings encouraged the Belgian government to divert the
motorway to avoid damaging these burgeoning sites of remembrance.
Of course, as archaeology re-establishes these historically significant sites, they become
magnets for tourism and education.
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Tourism and Education
As has already been suggested, the passing of the wartime generations has given rise to
“the need to formally monumentalise the Second World War and to treat the Western
Front of the First World War as a landscape of pilgrimage”. One effect of this has been
the transformation of battlefields into sites geared for tourism and education. Conflict
archaeology has facilitated the growth of battlefield tourism and education by providing
interpretive facilities and transforming the way that museums interpret the past.
The last thirty years has seen the numbers of people visiting sites of conflict grow
exponentially. Yet for some, visiting a battlefield can be a disappointing experience.
Gone is the tortured, battle scarred landscape of their imagination, replaced instead by
neat farming paddocks and reconstructed towns. At some sites, such as Anzac Cove,
erosion and development (ironically, to support growing tourism interest) have further
transformed the terrain, making it difficult for the non-specialist to visualise what
happened there. The result is that most ‘battlefield tour’ packages are in fact ‘cemetery
and memorial’ tours, focusing on the points of formal commemoration rather than
combat.
In the last decade, archaeology has begun, quite literally, opening up battlefields for
visitors. An obvious example of this comes from the Western Front where a number of
trenches have been excavated and preserved for the benefit of tourists. In 1999, the
British National Army Museum led an excavation of trenches at the Ocean Villas tea
rooms on the Somme battlefield. One of the central aims of this excavation was to create
“an interpretive feature for visitors” at the cafe. The trenches were excavated and the
story that the stratigraphy told (in effect a history of that site from 1915 to 1999) was
carefully recorded and presented in the form of interpretive literature. The trench was
then restored to its original condition using duckboards, sandbags and riveting and
opened to the café’s clientele. Similar projects have occurred elsewhere on the Western
Front, most notably at Beaumont Hamel, Bozinghe and Bayernwald.
In Belgium, the Passchendaele Memorial Museum 1917 has embraced archaeology as an
important means of interpreting the past to its visitors. In addition to excavating and
preserving an extensive set of tunnels beneath the town of Zonnebeke (visitors can
wander through a reconstructed version of these), the museum’s archaeologists recently
excavated the wartime railway that ran across the Broodseinde Ridge battlefield, from
Zonnebeke to Passchendaele.
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Excavated and preserved German trenches and pillboxes at Bayernwald on the Messines Ridge in Belgium. The local
tourism office in Kemmel curates them.
This route has been presented as ‘The Road to Passchendaele’, a self guided walk that
takes visitors across the 4 October 1917 battlefield in the footsteps of the 3rd Australian
Division. As well as presenting the visitor with an authentic experience of the battlefield’s
terrain, the route also encompasses a commemorative dimension, visiting Tyne Cot
Cemetery and a number of excavated battlefield features. Two of these, the remains of a
German pillbox and a section of the original railway were laid with wreaths when I
visited in October 2007. The museum has also established a school program for this
archaeological feature called ‘The Platoon Experience’. Visiting students dress in full
1917 battle kit and take on the persona of an Australian soldier in the 3rd Division. As a
platoon, the students move across the battlefield, re-enacting various stages of it and
developing empathy for ‘their’ character.
Traditionally, war museums have tended to risk sanitising war by displaying “attractive (if
troubling) displays of bright, highly polished” military equipment. The growth of conflict
archaeology in Europe over the last decade has brought about a shift in museum
philosophy, as a number of institutions have incorporated recently excavated items –
often rusty and damaged – into their collections.
The new interpretive centre at Tyne Cot Cemetery has even gone as far as only displaying
items excavated out of the surrounding fields in recent times. The twisted rifles, shattered
helmets and long lost personal effects create an intense link between past and present.
Their rusted and contorted forms provide a striking contrast with the carefully
manicured cemetery and verdant fields outside, and leave no room for the glorification
of war. Excavated weapons are not something for visitors to marvel over; they are the
detritus of war; the rusting, corrupt residue of humankind’s violent past.
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Conclusion
Conflict archaeology is not just about digging up battlefields in the quest to revise
military history’s existing narrative. It encompasses a comprehensive study of war’s broad
and varied landscape: combat, culture, home fronts, commemoration and above all, the
individual human (not just soldiers’, generals’ and politicians’) experience of war. It is
overwhelmingly ‘social’ and ‘public’ in its approach, being both about ordinary
individuals and for ordinary individuals - the tourist, the school student and the television
audience. By opening up and interpreting the landscape of conflict, archaeologists have
provided a new focus for commemoration, tourism and education. With few veterans of
the twentieth century’s defining conflicts left, it is likely that the role played by
archaeologists will only grow in importance. Few others are equipped to make the
landscapes and items they hold speak to us like the witnesses to history.
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