Great war archaeology

Underground hospitals, blockhouses, weapons and war machines, tinkering, religious items, all sorts of bottles, graffiti, rubbish pits, skeletons of horses and numerous human remains, anonymous or famous almost one century after their accidental or voluntary burial.

Yves Desfossés, Alain Jacques and Gilles Prilaux, responsible for excavations in Nord and Picardie, offer us the fruit of their recent observations and archaeological research on the front line and in the battlefields. Here, they present new data on Great War research, enriched with outstanding iconog- raphy. Archaeology makes a decisive contribution to our knowledge of this tragic episode in our recent history. Although trenches and shellfire may, sometimes, have disturbed much older archaeological sites, the scientific exploration of the remains of the 1914-1918 War completes the accounts of soldiers and sometimes contradicts official documents.

We discover an astonishing art form which employs shell casings, as well as the deeply moving funereal rites practised on the battlefield, where the con- cern to provide a, sometimes, fragmented body with a grave appears to con- tradict other evidence of a nameless slaughter.

For many years ignored, this archaeology of the modern-day world con- tributes to renewing the work of historians and forms new ties with a recent past which is fading from our memories. It has now become essential to pre- serve, through research, the sites of the battlefields of the First World War being inexorably destroyed by local development.