17. The Archaeologists

My name is Andy Brockman and I am the Lead Archaeologist on the Burma Spitfires Project. The Archaeology Fieldwork Team are the new kids on this block.  David Cundall has been following his dream for fifteen years.  We only became involved in the Autumn of 2012 when it became clear that there was much more evidence relating to events at Mingaladon during World War Two than even David Cundall had been able to consider up until now.  In particular it became clear that in order to complete the proposed excavation on time and on budget, with the minimum of disruption to the airport and maximum chance of finding what we hope to find, it would be necessary to interpret David’s evidence and the Geophysics in the light of everything else we knew had gone on at the Airfield site and in doing so to separate the archaeology of 1945/1946 from the rest of the history of the airfield and from the modern airport services.

Fortunately this is the kind of process undertaken by archaeologists every working day on development sites all over Britain and the USA; so when in the late Summer of 2012 I was approached by Wargaming and Room 608 Productions with a view to assessing the evidence we quickly identified exactly what we needed to do and the resources we would need.  After many meetings and conversations on Skype, even more hours spent in the archives and playing with images of the site on the computer and latterly the vitally important liaison meetings to ensure we have the right heavy plant and safety equipment in position, we are ready to go to Yangon and undertake the process which will turn all the hypotheses and speculation into facts on the ground.

I came into the Archaeology of Modern Conflict by accident.  In 2005 I was investigating a farm in south east London and spotted some unusual shapes on an Air Photograph taken in the Autumn of 1944.  Normally when we look at Air Photographs of sites in the UK we are trying to identify the indications in the landscape which can indicate around 10,000 years of archaeology, but it soon became apparent that what I was looking at was evidence of just a few years of wartime activity.  The unusual shapes were actually the site of No7Z Anti-Aircraft Rocket Battery Royal Artillery.  No 7Z was one of just 52 such sites in the whole of the UK and represented a pioneering attempt to use rockets to shoot down aircraft. 

As we continued to research in the archives, at the same time undertaking a programme of archaeological geophysics at the site, we unearthed more and more documents and finally, thanks to appeals in the local media, we also managed to track down a number of veterans who had served at the site.  These men, now all in their late eighties, recounted their memories of being teenage volunteer soldiers in the local Home Guard who had formed the bulk of the crew of the site.  They were able to colour the black and white of the air photographs and documents with their stories of how the teams on the Rocket Projectors loaded and fired their weapons and how, on one occasion they nearly mutinied over a breakfast of several days old steamed fish.

That project taught me a number of lessons.  Principally that the Archaeology of Modern Conflict has to be genuinely multidisciplinary utilising all the strands of evidence available including documents, not just archaeology in the ground.  It also demonstrated the importance of checking facts and sources as rigorously as any journalist chasing a story and above all the importance of not taking any aspect of the story for granted, even the words of an apparent witness.

The project also taught me the importance of grounding such work in the community who own it.  Not just the veterans and their families who guard and pass on the memories, artefacts and folklore of a particular conflict, but also the contemporary populations who own the various parts of these stories as part of their own history and culture.

To undertake this new investigation we are lucky that we have two of the most experienced Conflict Archaeologists in Britain joining our project team.

Martin Brown joins the team as Senior Field Archaeologist. Martin currently serves as Principal Archaeologist with WYG, an international planning, infrastructure and environmental consultancy and a longstanding member of the UK’s professional body for archaeologists, the Institute for Archaeologists. Martin was until recently a member of the Historic Environment Team of the UK Defence Infrastructure Organisation [DIO].  DIO is the branch of the Ministry of Defence which looks after the many historic buildings and archaeological sites which are found on the Defence Estate and which might find themselves subjected to anything form a road extension to being at the centre of an all arms exercise preparing service people for the worlds latest trouble spot and in either case are in need of archaeological investigation and conservation.  Martin also serves as co-director of the Plugstreet Project in Belgium which investigated the events around the pivotal Battle of Messine in 1917. 

In 2010 the Plugstreet team worked with the Belgian Authorities, the Commonwealth War Grave Commission and the Australian Government to restore his identity to the remains of Private Alan Mather of the Australian Imperial Force who was killed in action at the Battle of Messine and whose body remained on the battlefield until the Plugstreet Team found his remains.  The identification, which involved all the techniques of modern forensic investigation, including DNA profiling and led to Pvt Mather’s burial with full military honours attended by family members from Australia, born long after his death so far from home, but to whom this long lost soldier was still alive in their family story. 

The recovery and identification of Pvt Mather proved once again, not just the value of applying a scientific archaeological approach to the archaeology of war, but that our involvement in such archaeology carries with it a responsibility, both to the people who participated in the conflicts we study, on whichever side of the line they fought and to the descendants to whom this archaeology can bring a shared but distant past into sharp, sometimes personal and even painful, relief. 

This sense of responsibility and the opportunities archaeology offers has only been re-enforced by Martin’s work with the modern military.  Particularly through his involvement with “Operation Nightingale”, an award winning initiative from the British Army and the DIO which uses archaeology as a means to help rehabilitate servicemen and women who have mental or physical injuries and which has seen veterans including members of the Rifles injured in Afghanistan, excavating a Bronze Age ritual site, and a Saxon Warrior cemetery on Salisbury Plain and a Stirling Bomber on the South Downs of Sussex.

Rod Scott rounds out our team as Field Archaeologist and Military and Ammunition Finds Specialist.  Rod is also a member of the Plug Street Project.  He is a veteran of archaeological sites of many periods and he has directed sites on the Western Front in Belgium for the State of Flanders Archaeology Service and most recently, the excavation of a Medieval Monastic Cemetery in the Basque Country of northern Spain working with an international team of student excavators.   

As well as being a qualified archaeologist Rod is also part of that long and distinguished tradition of Archaeologists who have served in the British Army.  A tradition which includes archaeological pioneer Lt General Pitt Rivers, Colonel T E Lawrence [of Arabia] whose first visit to the Middle East was to study Crusader Castles and perhaps most famous of all, Sir Mortimer Wheeler, excavator of Maiden Castle and founder of both the Pakistan Archaeology Service and of the Institute of Archaeology at University College London, and pioneer of archaeology on Television, who served with the Royal Artillery in both World War One and World War Two, rising to the rank of Brigadier. Until he retired in the Autumn of 2012 Rod served in the Royal Logistics Corps as an Ammunition Technician and Explosive Ordnance Disposal Expert serving in most of the hot spots of the last thirty years.  Rod is an expert in identifying finds related to weapons and ammunition.

All three of us are delighted to be working on this project and to be working with the documentary crew.  We all believe in sharing our work with the public using all means possible and we are veterans of TV Archaeology actually first working together on an episode of Channel 4’s “Time Team” back in 2007, where we looking at the Conflict Archaeology of Shooters Hill in South East London.   Martin and Rod have also appeared in many other episodes of “Time Team” and the series about the archaeology of World War One, “Trench Detectives” and “Finding the Fallen”.