I've recently become interested in a show called Two Men In A Trench. It follows two battlefield archeologists as they investigate sites. Fascinating stuff.
The hosts are passionate about history, and they have that gift for making it come alive; some of my favourite bits have to be the endings where the hosts are sitting in their tent at dusk, having a beer, yakking about their findings and arguing about points of history with a bit of a glow on.
The show's BBC website has a transcript of a live chat with them. One of the hosts {Dr. Tony Pollard} mentions that when they started this gig, they assumed that human remains ought to be easy to find on the site of a battlefield where thousands had died; "we both know now as archaeologists," he says, "that there is a long and complicated story between people dying and them being buried. " He makes a few other points, and then goes on to say:
"At Waterloo for instance, when more than 50,000 men died on the same day, their bones were ploughed and a lot of their remains were removed and collected as bonemeal, and transported back to England as bonemeal and fertilizer."*
You can read here another brief but interesting interview with the other host, Neil Oliver.
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* That image deserves to be incorporated into a poem somewhere... something about how we are all grist to the mill, with hints of mad cow & Soylent Green...
Incidentally... found this while surfing for links: Archeology is Rubbish: A Beginner's Guide :)
Posted by edgar at March 11, 2004 10:30 AM