On the centenary of the First World War, Dr Faulkner will discuss cutting-edge projects looking at Zeppelin raids, the war in the Alps, and Lawrence of Arabia’s campaigns. This will be an introduction, with detailed case-studies, to the way in which modern conflict archaeology is transforming understanding of the human experience of industrialised warfare.

Modern conflict archaeologists take a multi-disciplinary approach that combines history, fieldwork, and anthropology. Dr Faulkner rejects the narrow-minded ‘revisionism’ of historians preoccupied with great-power politics. He argues that modern industrialised warfare must be understood as the barbarism of a world gone mad; that we need to explore the multi-dimensional human experience involved; and that we must understand the irrationality implicit in the transformation of the products of human labour into instruments of death and destruction. It is his contention that the archaeology and anthropology of the First World War can make a central contribution.

Dr Neil Faulkner FSA is a Research Fellow at Bristol University, Editor of Military History Monthly, and Co-director of field projects in Jordan, Slovenia, and Britain. An archaeologist and historian, his latest book, ‘A Marxist History of the World’, is currently being translated into five foreign languages.