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11 April 2012
The Weekender

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Let's start by being completely honest about why we started studying battlefields in the first place: this stuff can be almost too exciting for words.

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We're on Branxton Hill in Northumberland. We're where the Scots soldiers lined up in readiness to fight the English on 9 September 1513. It's raining and the wind is driving the droplets into our faces as we watch one of our metal detectorists check what he reckons is a 'strong signal'. We're cold and miserable and we're pretty sure it'll turn out to be just another chrome handle from a car door, or the clutch plate from a tractor, or maybe a shotgun cartridge - but we're wrong. Instead of another piece of junk to add to our growing collection, it's a lead cannonball. We take turns to handle it. It's about the size of a child's fist - not what you might think of at the mention of a cannonball - but it's so heavy! Mud-smeared and slightly battered though it is, it's unmistakeable. The awful weight is mesmerizing. On that September afternoon in 1513 an English artilleryman dropped this ball into a cannon that then exploded into life at the touch of a smouldering taper. Perhaps it missed its target; perhaps it ploughed into a phalanx of Scots soldiers, passing through their bodies like a hot knife before embedding itself in the rain-softened ground. There it lay undisturbed for 488 years. Now we come along, and we're the first people to handle it since that dreadful day. Nothing seperates us from the man who loaded it and the men it was blasted towards - except time. The battle of Flodden is alive for us again on that Northumberland hillside.

Archaeology can be a clinical, removed exercise, any sense of the individual being lost over the hundreds or thousands of years between an object being discarded and then recovered by an archaeologist. It is very difficult to put a face or an emotion to a person who made a neolithic pot 5,000 years ago, or dropped a cow bone on to a dungheap 400 years ago. This was normal life, the everyday round of social and domestic activity - the same things done by the same people day after day. That is not to say that archaeologists do not empathize with these people, and it would be very wrong to say that this type of archaeology is unimportant or boring. But there can be no denying that battlefield archaeology is different, the experience of doing this type of archaeology is very personal, even intimate. What we are sometimes looking at when we relocate objects dropped by soldiers - the arrowheads or bullets they used in battle, for example - are the movements and actions of a person who could have been in the last hours or even moments of his life.

Archaeology is the study of the human past through the recovery and study of the physical traces that people leave behind them. Archaeologists excavate the remains of houses, churches, temples, castles and tombs in their quest for evidence. These sites can tell us about the way people lived and how they treated their dead - graves are often excavated by archaeologists. Battlefields differ from all of these in that they tell us about where, when and how people actually died.

Our investigations are not framed within the secure walls of a house or even a castle. The battlefield is a broad canvas and a challenging one for an archaeologist. In order to make sense of expansive tracts of landscape and the other special demands of battlefield archaelogy, a customized set of techniques has to be mobilized, in addition to those usually used in archaeological investigation. These include metal-detector survey to locate discarded artefacts and battlefield debris over wide areas, and ground-penetrating radar to search for mass graves. All the results are then tied together using state-of-the-art mapping and topographic survey technology.

Everything people do leaves traces that an archaeologist can use to guild up a picture of what's been going on. But while archeaologists have tended to concentrate their efforts on sites where people went about the business of living and dying for hundreds or even thousands of years - ritual sites like Stonehenge in Dorset, or settlement sites like Skara Brae on Orkney - we decided to look for traces of living and dying that had happened in the space of a few hours. A lot of the work of archaeologists is painstaking, methodical and time-consuming - even pretty mundane. But the basic premise of archaeology could hardly be more fascinating: it's about snooping around after people and seeing what they get up to. It's a licence to be nosy.

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? Penguin Books Limited 2002

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